She wets a finger in her mouth and traces one of the angry welts across her shin. Wonders if every moment she moves through will mark her somehow. This time, at least, she’s glad to have proof. It felt good, safe, pressed up against him, fingertips laddering his ribs through his T-shirt. The night rushing at them so fast her eyes teared up. She’d wanted him to keep riding, all night, right up to the border. Sleep by the river. Any river. Any place that wasn’t home. But he’d turned off the highway and onto her road, past the few neighbouring houses with their spooky, lonely television glow seeping through closed blinds. Will pulled over just short of the house, and she climbed off, didn’t argue. He must have sensed her disappointment, though, and misread it.
I’d take you closer, you know, but your dad. He’d probably lob a grenade at me.
I told you, she said, unthreading the helmet strap from where it bit into her chin. He’s gone.
Yeah, but he’s gotta come back sometime.
She’d shrugged and handed him back his helmet. Anyway, he’s not the one to worry about, believe me. Thanks for the ride. And she’d walked towards the house, holding her breath in the flood of quiet that came before the kick of the engine.
He’d reappeared towards the end of November, just materialised in place of his father in the mechanics shed. She’d missed the bus and was scuffing the forty minutes home in her clompy Oxfords, and there he was, re-chroming parts of Mack Ferguson’s pristine Velocette that not one soul had ever seen the man ride.
Lani remembered Will at fourteen; he’d had a sort of helpless, unfinished look back then, downy buzzcut and wet, marsupial eyes. When his folks split his mother whisked him off to live in Auckland. Lani had imagined spearfishing (true), and snowboarding (also true), had flared up with envy for an instant and just as quickly forgotten about it. About him. Now in his dad’s workshop he was kneeling over a bucket, wearing a face mask and thick rubber gloves, like for dishes or strangulation. Hair brushing the collar of a T-shirt that might have been black once, now greyed with wear, a Rorschach of sweat showing between his shoulderblades. Will turned around then, had maybe felt her gawking, and she saw the glint of a barbell through his brow. That wouldn’t fly here, wouldn’t last long. She was two years younger and she could’ve told him that much. It seemed a stupid thing to say though, a bad way to start. She couldn’t think up anything better, but he saved her from having to. Raised his gloved hand and squinted under it, then swiped his dust mask away against his shoulder.
Hey, he said. Lana Burroughs.
Lani.
Right. You shot up. He left the headlight casing submerged in its chemical bath, and came out into the daylight, unpeeling his gloves.
He gave her a look she couldn’t read, then came out with it: Is it true what people’ve been saying?
She felt a little stab in her stomach about what he might have meant. Was it true she’d had an abortion? No, just glandular fever. That her uncle was an ex-con? That was only talk, though sometimes she wished it were true. Then Tetch would be weird-interesting instead of just weird-weird. Was Matt D true, was Jarrod Blackwood true, was Marshall Weste true? Yes, yes, and almost. Not quite, with Weste; he hadn’t been able to finish, and so they’d sat there quiet for a while passing a smoke back and forth between them, until Weste punched the bricks like an idiot and skinned his knuckles. Later he’d tried to get his whole hand in, as if to settle things that way. But whose business was any of it?
What? she asked. She untucked her school shirt, hot now and almost bored.
What happened with your dog and all that.
For a moment she felt relieved, and then ashamed for feeling relieved. Yeah, she told him, it was revolting.
Sorry, he said. Think I kinda remember that dog. Dad says he’s heard of lambs ripped up pretty bad.
She couldn’t tell if he was taking the piss. Where were there sheep around here? He’d been gone four years. She looked for the fourteen-year-old in him—the scrawny BMX rat with the rusty crust around his nostrils from constant nosebleeds. But that kid was gone, or pretty well disguised under work-stained Levis and the faded tour shirt of some Kiwi punk band. He wasn’t joking, she decided, just confused maybe.
Reckon the government will get onto it one day, he was saying. Wait and see—sooner or later some ag minister will be throwing their weight at it, tuning in to all the crackpots like it was the last thylacine.
She blew air through her teeth and let that go for an answer. Nobody spoke much of politicians in her house, of what they might do. Only what might be done to them: grisly stuff.
So you’re just back for a visit, she guessed, and Will shrugged, glancing back at the dismantled bike.
School’s done. Dad’s sick. Made sense. Then he told her he’d meant to travel, after finishing school, backpack South America. But there wasn’t the cash for it, anyway, and his old man had to get to dialysis twice a week.
But Argentina, Colombia. Not like they’re going to dry up and blow away, hey? He was looking at her legs: long, bruised, brown enough. Her school socks had slid halfway down her shins on the walk, exposing the still-pink flick of a scar where an ignition key had crushed into her knee over winter. Swinging the wheel on Matt’s old man’s ruined Datsun, her eyes closed, driving just to crash.
The uniforms they make you gooses wear … Where I went we just wore whatever. Anything we liked. You could dye your hair blue if you wanted and nobody would give you a second look.
She didn’t point out that he’d once had to wear the same uniform. But she did tell him then, about the barbell.
He’d only grinned at her. We’ll see, hey?
*
She doesn’t want to risk the bathroom, a collision with Evelyn in the hallway—she’ll just get roped into doing some other thing—so settles for dry-shaving her legs in the privacy of her room. One of her father’s disposable plastic razors, a cheapo that’ll take skin with it here and there if she’s not careful. She rinses her shins with squirts from a water bottle, brushes the last of the fake snow from her hair. Tonight there’ll be a bonfire, a lot of booze, a dozen ways of leaving without leaving. Trina with some sweet-awful rocket fuel to rinse out the bitter grit.
The dress is a knee-length lurex halter, split to show thigh. Wet-looking, backless. No bra, then. Not like there’s much to hold up anyway. She’d seen Trina wearing it once, the dress, and what it did to her. Who it made her into. It had taken a flask of snaffled bourbon and an English essay to wrangle it for tonight. Worth it, Lani figures, watching herself in the narrow mirror on the back of the door, writhing a bit, like dancing without trying too hard. Glitter gumming her eyelashes together, purple mascara streaking her hair. There was an idea of what she was supposed to look like. This isn’t it, really, but it’s as close as she’s getting. (Aunt Stell at Christmas, saying, You look so much like your mum at your age, but so much … I don’t know. Older? You always look so tired, honey.
Yeah, well. My mother didn’t have my mother as a mother. She’d said something like that.)
She packs a bag with a pair of skinny pink heels, makeup patiently filched from the chemist, lipstick so dark it’s nearly black. A green plastic pillbox filled with her father’s meds, all of them jumbled in together. Sampler.
Rolled into a pair of socks rolled into a drawer, the bundle of autumn-coloured bank notes. Always in dreams she’s kicking up money amongst crinkling leaves and chip-packets rustling in the gutters. Of course it never happens that way. Some of the bundle is from spruiking the meds, but most of it comes from the grandfolks, care of Stell. Ghostfolks, Lani calls them; she wouldn’t know them if she met them in the street. On the hush, now … Enough there for a bus ticket to Sydney and a week of floating up there, if she wants, though that’s not what they’d meant it for. Or maybe they had, who really knew.
Outside, the squeal and shudder of the garage roller door going up. Evelyn hauling C
hristmas junk out there. Conclusively, she’d repeated this morning. Tests to prove conclusively. That Lani was not her father’s child. But Lani had been overhearing this story since before she’d known what conclusively even meant, and the shock of it, the hurt of it, had more or less been worn away. Anyway it turned out she was. Anyway what it really means, this story her mother tells over and over, is: Be on my side. Get in my corner.
She spins the volume up on Sugar Sugar Sugar and escapes through the slit window mesh.
*
She reaches the Ark early, dropping into the narrow slice of shade it throws. Ark is only a name people give it; really it’s the ferrocement hull of a ship, propped up in the middle of someone’s fallow paddock, way back from the road. It makes no sense out here, hours and hours from any water deep enough for it to belong in. And at the same time it makes a kind of sense, a kind of dream logic, having been here longer than herself or any of her family, its iron struts bubbled with vibrant rust, sunk down into the baked earth. Whether it’s an abandoned project, or somebody’s idea of a joke, it’s everyone’s now. The town’s unofficial guestbook, all graffed over with tags and postcodes and who was here in ’74, ’78, ’83, etc., and who sux cox and what their phone numbers are or used to be. And above it all, in big orange house-paint letters: The End Shall Come With A Flood. Sometimes there are cows nosing about under the Ark, bubblegum tongues stretching out for the wedge of grass that stays green in its shadow. It does look kind of biblical then.
Lani swaps her boots for heels and stashes her bag in the shade, both her and the Ark looking out of place, waiting together for something to happen. Something to lift them up and carry them elsewhere. Just this feeling, this inkling. Like maybe there are places in the world that don’t intend to press you flat, grind you out between the sky and the earth. The world is getting smaller; even she can see that much, even from out here. Or the spaces between people are getting smaller, the distances. Shrinking.
She listens for Will’s Honda, but there’s no engine noise at all. Just the rushing sound of the grass and its cicadas, all of it oceanlike. She keeps time, making a maraca of her father’s pills in their green plastic box. She can’t remember the proper names for all of them—the two-coloured capsule ones, and the round vanilla-yellow ones with the cross etched into the top. The tiny blue pills with hard glossy shells like baby M&M’s, but the insides are dusty white and bitter. These her mother crushes up with spoonfuls of honey when Ru can’t sleep.
Mum, you can’t give that stuff to kids.
Excuse me, madam, you’re the expert now, are you?
Ru standing in the doorway, swamped in an oversized T-shirt nightie, hair a rat’s nest. Glaring like, Who asked you?
Fine.
The pills all do different versions of the same thing: tranqs. Tranquillise. As though their dad’s a dangerous animal escaped from somewhere. When he takes them, half his lights go out—bang!—and he just wants to sit in his chair and watch reruns of old Paul Newman movies.
They muck up me thinking, he complains of the pills. But every single time Mum asks him what he’s thinking about, meds or no meds, he just blinks at her like a buffalo and says, Nothin’.
In the years before Ru—or the years before Ru can probably remember—there were sometimes coin tricks. A copper one-cent piece rubbed and rubbed against Dad’s elbow while he told a story about the shy possum, and when the story was over both possum and coin had disappeared. Kerpoof. She remembers, too, animal faces drawn in blue biro onto the shells of hard-boiled eggs—the childish curling Ws of cat mouths, and the sharp Vs of bird beaks—so that when she opened the fridge to sneak a mouthful of condensed milk, cold from the can, there’d be a miniature zoo lined up inside the door, staring back at her accusingly. A little egg-animal jury.
In those days he’d found kinder ways of getting away. Fossicking trips to the salvage yard with Uncle Tetch for electrical bits and pieces, or mushroom-hunting through the pine plantation and along the nearby windbreaks. A couple of times he’d thought to take Lani, the two of them rugged up against the autumn chill, sifting under the dripping trees for the alien forms that nudged up overnight from the damp carpet of needles. Slippery Jacks. She thought he was fibbing about the name, whose suspect caps were sickening to look at and worse to touch, sometimes with millipedes or other crawlies caught in their goo; who would eat those?
I would, her dad told her, taking a raw chomp out of one to make her squeal. But it was the pine mushies they were mostly after anyway, a poisonous-looking orange and if you weren’t careful and broke the gills they stained your hands like monster blood.
He didn’t mind. He was different out there. Easier. Funny, even, telling her his nonsense jokes.
Alright missy, you tell me: what would you rather be or a policeman? A question that called for no sensible answer.
At first it stumped her, but then she caught on: I’d rather be a Pollywaffle. An octopus’s walking stick.
But then he’d go all serious. Don’t you ever go picking these without me, you hear? You get mixed up, pick the wrong kind, you’ll go to sleep and never wake up again.
She’d shook her head for no as he carefully swept back the needles and twisted the thing up by the stalk, placing the prize into her spread hands so that she could deliver it to the newspaper-lined basket. Brushing her fingertips along the gills on the way: monster blood.
At home he cooked them up with salt and browned butter, stinking the house out till it smelled rich and earthy as a burrow. And though they may as well have been slugs for how slimy they were—and how they tasted, for that matter—she’d pretended they were just as good as marshmallows and eaten them anyway, as many bites as she could stand, because she wanted him to know that she liked the things he liked. Because she wanted to prove, conclusively, and because she didn’t want to be left behind the next time he went out swinging that basket to the pines.
But not long after she’d started school his gatherings turned into wanderings, and his wanderings turned into fucked-off-agains—and these fucked-offs might be measured in days or in weeks. Then later, in months, spanning birthdays and holidays. And it wasn’t always easy to tell which would be which when he went out the door. Because at first, when he was starting to go bad, all he ever took was his wallet. Though sometimes her mother would raise her eyebrows as the flyscreen banged closed behind him, and she’d mouth the word Go, so Lani would, right after him, one night bolting out in her summer pyjamas and purple rabbit slippers. Earlier there’d been a fight, and a few broken things made of glass, so she wasn’t allowed to walk in the kitchen, and she didn’t properly remember the rest of what had happened in there. After a while all those squalls had rolled into one another. But she remembers scarpering outside, that particular evening. How it had just finished raining, the world misty-quiet and grey with the last of the light, the insects on pause and the dirt road trickling with little errant streams. She pelted along it and when she caught her father he pulled up sharp, whirled around on her.
Go home, he said, pointing back to where home was or should be.
She could feel the wetness of the road soaking up through her slippers. Heard her voice shake when she answered him, I’ll go home if you go home.
Not going to happen, Kiddo. He turned and kept walking, and she shadowed him.
Jesus, he said. Your mother put you up to this, didn’t she? You should be in bed.
She had been put up to it, but Lani said nothing. Just ghosted alongside him, a smatter of steps for each of his long strides, the night coming down quiet around them and their road rising gently to meet the highway. Clouds raced across the face of the moon, veiling and unveiling it, though no breeze found them down there on earth.
How far is it?
How far is what?
Where we’re going? She asked only to say something; she knew where he was headed—or had been, before she caugh
t him. The station, which stood a little way out of town, where trains rarely found reason to stop. He would wait there, two hours, six hours, however long. Or maybe he’d hitch to Melbourne with one of the trucks, or someone driving back from a holiday up north.
But tonight he said, Oh, bloody hell. A man can’t even take a frigging walk. And this time, at least, he turned for home. The road had drunk up the rain and was mucky in places. He looked down at her feet and so did she, at the bedraggled ears of her slippers. No chance of those coming back into the house.
I suppose you’ll want to be carried now.
She did want that—her feet were pinging with the icy needles that arrive shortly before numbness. But it seemed important to say no, and so she said no, and he didn’t fight her on it, accepting her refusal with a nod and a cough.
Her father was slower, walking back. No timetable in his head, no train to make or to miss. Lani kept pace with him easily, slopping along in her ruined slippers, triumphant. From somewhere came the gurgle of frogtalk. She wanted to say something too, but couldn’t think what. Something encouraging. When nothing came to her she took hold of his jacket sleeve to let him know that there were no hard feelings.
There would be many nights afterwards where she could not turn him around, where there was nothing she could say or do to shame the rage out of him, bring him home. The last time she even tried—though she was thirteen then, and had more or less given up on him by that stage—she shadowed him towards the highway, silent except for when she asked him for a cigarette and he rolled one for her in the pitch dark. They bobbed along, closer in gait now, her legs nearly as long as his, and in place of talk there was the hiss and flare of tobacco, the twin glowing ends that seemed conversation enough, until she felt the road sloping up beneath her feet and she told him: It’s me who cops it, you know? When you’re not around.
Loving, Faithful Animal Page 7