I watch out as semi-trailers rattle past on the highway stuffed to the gunnels with sheep. I want to get on the road and forget everything, Isabel, Ruthie, Rags to Riches, the taste of Sharen, and the smell of eucalyptus in the canyon.
I DRIVE MY mother home in silence, past Tooradin Primary kids wandering home early to the shops, brown canvas satchels and hats, zinc cream on their noses. Ruthie, with her crossword and milk from the usual source, rehashing how she found not one bloody thing in that ghastly new self-service. I wonder if she smells Sharen on me.
As I wait to turn from the highway back onto Station Road, the pale sky whitens, the blinker clicking just out of rhythm with the tap-drip sound as my mother opens and closes her nervous pursed lips. I stare across to the mudflats, wondering where I could be now, out the other side of the city, Donnybrook Road or Kalkallo, or maybe Trafalgar or Moe if I took the coast. Two semi-trailers rush past and the weight of them shifts us, my hands lifeless on the wheel. Genoni’s yard of machinery behind the chain-link fence. Sharen in the distance, on the sandy service road gazing up at the pub or maybe the sky, as if she watches something rare in flight.
“Are you fifteen?” my mother asks. A memory of her finding me jerking off as a teenager behind the door in the bungalow, and how she told me to take it outside. As if I was playing with fireworks.
“What do you mean?”
“Holding hands with Sharen in the street,” she says. “I’ve never seen anything so tragic.”
The smack of her words from beside me starts the pin-wheels inside my head. “Just trying to find out where Walker sells the ponies.” Lying to her so easily as though she doesn’t know the truth. I edge the car out an inch but the traffic keeps coming. Should tell her I’m like my father but worse; I have more choices than he ever did. We’ve always been alike. The part of me that used to escape all this, head up to the old cruising places, gutter crawling on Dalgety Street. Forty dollars for a young strung-out migrant girl I didn’t respect, scouting the pavement for some oblique connection with my father whom I don’t respect either, yet searching nonetheless. Not everyone’s as relentlessly correct and respectable as Ruthie Brailsford Rawson.
A stream of vehicles pulling boats and sand bikes, trailers full of holiday gear.
“Do you love your Venezwegian?” my mother asks but I say nothing. The way this town, this farm, and family cave in on me makes Laurel Canyon feel as if it exists in a swirl of leaves.
“Interesting,” my mother says in subtle condemnation. “Put a penny in it will you?”
As I accelerate, I turn on the radio to silence my mind. The beat of Cold Chisel staticky, familiar from decades ago. The last plane out of Sydney’s almost go-one. The pub-rock fury that bubbles amongst us here, manifests in sharp wit and sarcasm. And only seven flyin’ hours, till I’ll be landin’ in Hong Kong. I switch the dial to the ABC. A story of drought in the outback. I turn it off and just drive, don’t want to hear about farmers whose land has sucked the dreams right out of them, who go out and shoot themselves at sunset in their trucks, leaving their families in distant houses with the awful moment of an echo. Trees on the horizon rippling like vegetables boiled in blood.
When my mother and I get back to the farm and park on the drive we don’t get out, just stare at the stained-glass roses on the windows of the enclosed part of the veranda. Through the glass I make out my father chatting to the carpenter by the leggy wooden clotheshorse. My mother shakes her head as she focuses on him holding court as though he still runs the show.
“At least everything will lock now,” I say.
My mother pretends to read the front page of the Sun but it’s mostly photos from the cricket at the MCG. AUSSIES SLAUGHTER KIWIS IN FIRST TEST MATCH. She looks up. “Hopefully we can keep him out too,” she says. She folds the paper and I notice the tarnished gold band still on her wrinkled wedding finger.
“Why do you still wear your ring then?” I ask her.
She seems undaunted. “So nobody gets any big ideas. And because I can’t get it off.” The band embedded in the rolls of freckled skin, like the way she’s folded into this soil and the soil folds into him. My father now motioning out through the leadlight, beckoning us in. He won’t want to get sucked into paying for all the “ridiculous” locks and bolts.
“You could have it cut off,” I tell her.
“Hold your horses,” Ruthie shouts at my father, stuffing the newspaper into her dilly bag.
“Remind me, why did you marry him?” I ask.
She reaches over and rests her worn-out fingers on my knee, looks up from the ring, her deep-set burnished eyes creasing up more with a dry-lipped smile. “Because I wanted to have you.”
I rest my hand on hers. “Why did you want me?”
She pretends to look puzzled. “I needed someone worth talking to.”
Could that even be partially true? “That’s a good reason to have a child,” I say.
She grunts as she pushes the heavy door open. “Yes,” she says. “Until they leave you.” She raises a cupped hand and forces a halfhearted wave at my father, turning her wrist as if she’s the Queen. “Or they end up like him anyway.”
Now I’m hiding out on Lauren’s pocked wooden toilet seat feeling queasy. Through the plywood wall, the sound of her humming in the kitchen where I left her stirring oatmeal. This washroom tucked under the stairs with the mirrored treads and risers inches above my head as I sit with this woozy, drifty feeling. A desire to get even farther from home. If I could stand up I’d take the Jeep and leave, but where to? I could fly out to that farm and surprise him, if I wasn’t terrified of being stuck in a plane for more than a day. I could show up on a horse in front of that house if I wasn’t terrified of horses. If he wanted me there.
Out the tiny window, the mule stands in its muddy pipe corral. Beyond it, the creek with the swimming hole where Lauren waited for me. She looked innocent without her mascara or a cigarette, standing with a careful smile. The touch of the water was silky and warm, fed from a spring, she said. A hint of sulfur as I lay out on the wide flat rock in the middle, felt my breasts loll above me like seaweed. She stepped through the water between us and draped her wet cloth on my shoulder, uninvited. “Maybe you’re not used to being touched like this,” she said when I flinched. She let the orange cloth hang there like a flag and the warmth of the water felt suddenly prickly. I was unsure if I’d go where she wanted, to be touched the way Daniel’s rough hands don’t know how. Daniel who I wash but he rarely washes me.
Without asking she soaped my arms. As I wondered what might come next, a dragonfly buzzed close to my face. “Look,” she said. “A blue dancer.” She let the cloth sink along the narrow ridge of my tummy. “Raccoon for curiosity,” she said. “Dragonflies for change.” She massaged my belly, rocking me slightly from side to side and the tops of the mountains brushed at the edges of my eyes as she kneaded and rocked me. Then in a shot of morning light, the image of Daniel doing this with someone else made my body jolt unexpectedly, a kind of spasm in my throat and belly and tears flooded from my eyes, the taste of them salty in my mouth as she held me in the water, quietly stroking my hair.
Another pang in my gut and I hope it’s just dread. I strain up to the image that hangs on the back of this bathroom door. A collage of Lauren towering toe-out in a dress like a dancer. Black pilgrim shoes with minstrel bells, striped leggings made of scraps from torn prose and ribbons. The kinship I feel with scrappers, or anyone who sticks things together from scratch. The Christmas tree I left in Laurel Canyon on its own. What a waste of time. I lean forward to read from the skirt: Come my beloved before the beauty fades, and then on her arm: my tears make a track to the water. Things Daniel would never write, pasted in the shape of her calves, her stance almost manly and the hem of her skirt frilling wide. Ring out a thousand songs of old. Maybe I should be with an artist. Her hair and face up in the dark, formed from strips of fabric and paper, dreadlocked purple and blue, a patchwork of pasted BART tick
ets, words. DISAPPOINTMENT laid into the strength of her jaw. A new twinge in my gut and the hope that Daniel feels something like this, regret and panic and his own disappointment. I just wish it wasn’t coming over me in the morning. When he talked of marriage, I tried to believe he could commit to that, but we’ve never mentioned children.
“Your oatmeal’s ready,” yells Lauren. This troubled image of her looms in front of me. Ripped from books of poetry. Ring out the grief that saps the mind . . . Ring out the false, ring in the true. Daniel so caught up in his matter-of-fact world, he probably wouldn’t recognize Tennyson. He’d never read Neruda, hadn’t heard of Lorca until after we met. A curl in my belly and I wonder if I’d be ballsy enough to tear up Tennyson for art, but I know Daniel would if I asked him to. He doesn’t have a fear of the sacred. I’ve never seen him afraid except of going back home to his mother, and maybe commitment. And answering the phone.
“Oatmeal’s for old people and children,” I shout, and white folks. The way Daniel cooks porridge in the morning and wonders why I won’t share the milky, cream slush. The thought of it has me bending double, reeling down onto the floor and turning to the porcelain. A sudden retch of liquid from nowhere, vomiting all that’s inside me, hugging this cold toilet as if it’s all I have.
THE BEDSIDE CLOCK shines 11:44 p.m. Still in my jeans, all doors and windows locked, woken by music from my mother’s room. My hand aches so I reach for the painkillers, find a glass of milk beside the bed, flowers in a vase. I turn on the light. Black-eyed Susan, a rose, and pale hibiscus. Not from this garden. The chocolate purple center of the Susans, the vines my grandmother grew, the scent of the rose petals, Isabel, her fragrance Roses for Men. The one she always wants me to wear too, but the notion of men with perfume gives me that slithery feeling like when I see a husband carrying a purse for his wife. Phobias I live with from growing up here. I get up to check, find the phone in the sitting room to let Isabel know I was thinking of her smell, tell her something true, but as I tread down the dark the hall, I realize the music emerges from elsewhere, the main side-hall bathroom. My mother’s old Frank Sinatra. A very good year for small-town girls . . . A voice sings along, throaty and maudlin. And soft summer nights, we’d hide from the lights. A smoky female voice. No need to have heard Sharen sing to know who it is. I open the door and she smiles up at me, half-innocent, sitting on the toilet seat sucking on a reefer in her short white skirt, bare legs dangling, innocent as a girl. A candle lit beside her on the marble stand, my old red vinyl portable turntable circling unevenly.
She lazily points at my mother in the wavery light, just in a nightie on the low antique folding chair at the bath end, the dog curled at her feet. Candlelit like something from Oliver Twist. She almost looks serene.
“Ruthie called me,” says Sharen. “She was worried.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?” I ask my mother.
She opens her eyes reluctantly, scratches her hair with both hands and yawns. “We’re waiting for Reggie to come home,” she says as if she’s not worried at all. Sharen sings on softly, pot smoke wafting through the open flywired window. When I was twenty-one, it was a very good year. A very good year for city girls who lived up the stairs. I feel as if I’m the intruder. This secret salon in the middle of the night. Outside, the warm gray lawn, the line of black cypresses. My mother dozing on the flimsy cloth chair, frail as a ghost in her nightie, hearing music she remembers with someone who’s happy to share it or afraid if she goes to bed she might not wake. Her toenails have been painted dark blue. Sharen looks younger in the shifting light, the breeze from the window, her already messed-up hair.
“I can wait up for Reggie,” I tell my mother, extend a hand to help her up. “Come on, alley-oop!”
“Cut it out,” she says, shaking me off. “We weren’t bothering you.”
Sharen gives me a hard stoned stare then smiles. “We’ll let Reggie in, Ruthie. Don’t worry.”
My mother regards us sleepily. “Well, if I’m not wanted,” she says, struggling up with a hand on the lip of the bath, the dog scuttling from under her feet. She rests a hand on the windowsill for balance and stares at Sharen’s arm, either at the doobie in her fingers or the bruise near her wrist that Sharen covers up with a hand.
“And look after her,” says my mother and then I wonder if she asked Sharen here for another reason, playing her cards to keep me. She wasn’t a bridge whiz for nothing.
“Of course,” I say as I usher my barefooted mother out into the hall. I watch as she touches the columns for balance, waves good night over her shoulder as she disappears around the turn.
SHAREN IN MY room with the candle and saucer, the spliff barely alive between fingers. She passes it to me and I take a drag like a pro between thumb and first finger, the end damp between my lips as I suck, the ease of the smoke down my throat till it tickles my lungs and I stifle a cough. I’ve forgotten how much I love this. Sharen amused as she sits on my bed. She places the candle on the side table. “Did you like the flowers?” she asks. The thought of her sneaking in while I dreamt of Isabel and I’m standing here pulling the last from her roach. How Isabel goes on about weed distorting time and memory, how she needs to be with someone who wants to be present, aware and whatever. Now I already feel the escape as I drag from the last of the blunt and Sharen collapses down on the bed. My mother’s radio plays Harry Belafonte. Brown-skin girl, stay home and mind baby. The dog is in with us laid out by the open fireplace.
I ease the espadrilles off Sharen’s dusty feet and I slide in behind her, my face in her already messed-up hair, her smell like an engine about to catch fire, the skunk and burnt sage smell of the smoke in her mixed with hairspray and dye, ether and ethanol, whatever is in them, paint and solvents. Not a rose among them. I know this is crazy but I don’t want to stop and the high is foggy and close to sublime.
“Pray for Reggie,” she says. “I haven’t seen him for days. I’m afraid Walker got to him for real this time.” She turns her head and the sound of her breath makes it seem as if she’s fading. My hand delving down under the skirt. No panties, not shaven or waxed like Isabel and her fancy Brazilians, but the full wiry bloom. I travel with my fingers to find Sharen’s pinkness as the candle melts in on itself. Slip from my jeans and I’m pushing against her newly waxed thighs but her breath is a whistle. “Can I fuck you?” I whisper but she doesn’t answer, nudges slightly toward me, opens and I make my way gently inside her, digging in softly. She moans her approval and I ply her deeply and even, keep watch out the uncovered window for her son.
“Can you take me away from here?” she whispers. “Take me to America?”
“Let’s do it,” I say as I rupture inside her, collapse down by her side.
WEDNESDAY
We wake to the dog growling low in the gray light of morning. A mad kookaburra shriek then a deafening crash through the window, an echo on the headboard. Sharen grabs me by the arm, hauls me to the floor. We lie there wide-eyed, breathing into each other between the bed legs and the wall. The dog barks like crazy. Against the skirting lies a smooth stone the size of an egg. I reach for it, examine it in the faint light, an eye etched into the rock, the rough lines of the lids and a dug-out circle. Just a rock but I remember Walker stalking the sand hills in the bush, foxes and possums laid out in the night. It’s heavy; the eye carved as if it’s ancient, all-seeing, dug up from the land. Sharen with tears shining her eyes. She holds me, won’t let me move, her lips warm against my rigid neck. “I brought this. It’s my fault.”
“I’ve brought it too,” I say, this colliding. I brought it with me. But it doesn’t mean Walker can watch between curtains then catapult rocks through the glass. “Lucky it wasn’t a bullet.”
“He’s not normal,” whispers Sharen.
“Really?” I feign surprise, listen for my mother to stir across the hall and realize her radio’s off, no sound, only the dog who comes to sniff our faces. No morning birds in the trees, I pull the sheet down to cove
r her, crawl around shards like frosted leaves on the floor and look through the cracks that river from the hole in the glass like some distorted kaleidoscope flower. Nothing but morning. Horses grazing, a car passing along the road.
I go check on Ruthie, find her sitting alert in her bed, waiting. “It sounds like London in the Blitz.”
“Walker,” I tell her, hold the rock out as an exhibit in my hand and she reaches for it, looks right into the eye.
“The spoils of war,” she says, strangely enlivened, the fire returned to her pupils.
Without asking permission, I close all the curtains, go to pick up the phone in the sitting room. The local police number’s now been crossed out on the list on the wall, but it’s in the front of the blue local phone book. A whiny receptionist transfers me to Sergeant Brent Gullikson, a name familiar from primary school.
“This is Daniel Rawson,” I tell him. “Down at Tooradin.”
“Yeah,” he says gruffly. “I remember.”
And I remember him, crying in a heap with a spider bite at school camp in Point Leo. When Mr. Stainer told him it was only a mosquito. “We’ve had some trouble out here on the farm,” I say. “Someone threw a rock through a window.” We speak as men, as if we don’t remember.
“How big?” he asks.
“Big enough to kill somebody.”
“Anyone dead or injured?” he asks.
“No.”
“Bedroom window?”
Already I don’t appreciate his tone. “Yes,” I say reluctantly.
“Sleeping alone?”
“My mother’s in her eighties,” I say. “She lives here on her own. It could have done her in.”
He clears his throat slowly. “Well I suggest you come in and make a statement or sort it out amongst yourselves.” I can feel his smirk, this small-town mean shit. Standing in the dark room with everything already bright outside, the angry sound of Eazy-E, Fuck de po-lice, fuck de po-lice, runs through my mind.
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