by Anna Taylor
Nana Jo and Phil are well ahead of them now. It is impossible to tell their dark figures apart. Faith’s speed is making her jerky, her feet sinking, threatening to throw her off balance. She is filled with an astonishment that almost renders her dumb—though not for long. John is catching her up. She can see his face out of the corner of her eye. He looks extraordinarily pleased with himself, as if he’s just discovered language—those words in particular—for the first time in his life.
‘I don’t think you should be saying that,’ she says, sounding like someone she may have once known: a fearsome teacher, perhaps, at high school. ‘Has it just slipped your mind? That you’re almost married?’ Her voice is quite low, but she knows he hears her. She feels his footsteps drop away.
She only wants to catch up to Nana Jo and Phil. She can see them—so far away—and tries calling, though her voice isn’t strong any more but sounds strangled, all worn out. She tries to run then, but can feel after just a few steps that she’s made a mistake. The awkwardness of Ernie is jogging in her arms. If she tries to slow down now she will slip, she knows it. She thinks that thought, and within seconds the ground responds. Her boot hits something hard, and just like a bad slapstick skit her movements go into slow motion—her eyes scan a line of black rocks jutting through the snow all around her; her arms lurch forward; and the urn does too, taking off like a bird, flying out of her hands. It hovers in the air, glowing sky-blue, and as she falls, Faith thinks, Maybe it’ll just bounce.
It doesn’t, of course. Between blinks, it floats, then falls onto a rock, and there are pieces of it lying everywhere on the snow. Ernie’s ashes puff out into the air in a plume of dust. The wind blows them onto the snow, and onto Faith—her hair, her skin, up her nose, into her mouth.
Ernie is everywhere. Faith—down on all fours, and gasping—tries to scoop him up off the snow with her hands. The ash is not a smooth powder, as she’d imagined, but is gritty, tiny shards of bone in it like the bones in tinned salmon, or sardines.
‘Can somebody help me?’ she shouts. ‘Can somebody help?’
Up ahead of her, Faith sees the indistinct shapes of Nana Jo and Phil pause, and when she shouts again, louder this time, she sees their bodies turn. She tries to scoop Ernie up with the shards of urn—the little pieces of bone easier to catch than the dust which, she realises, would be the powder of his skin, the few strands of hair that had remained on his head, his heart and lungs, beloved to them all, that had grown sallow and clogged with age. She spies the molten curl of his wedding ring—just a wisp of its metal, glowing against the white.
‘Can somebody help?’ she calls again, but the words turn into an awful choking cough, long strands of spit stringing out of her mouth and landing in bubbles on the ash. When she turns, she vaguely sees Trudie and her mother moving towards her more rapidly than she ever thought her mother could move. John has disappeared entirely, seemingly vacuumed up by the snow.
The dark figures of her family, snaking their way downhill and uphill towards her, remind her of ants—all of them, enormous ants—a broken procession of them coming to save her. Don’t ants carry their dead in funeral processions too? Don’t they, too, try to honour them? Nana Jo has started to run now (an extraordinary sight), and as she gets closer and closer—the colours of her clothes and her face and her boots sharpening into focus—Faith hears her voice, calling:
‘A snowman! Faith? We can make him into a snowman!’
She hears the words in bursts, the jolting of Nana Jo’s jog making the rhythm of them seem odd, like she’s attempting to do rap.
‘He would have liked it, Faith—being a snowman,’ Nana Jo calls again.
Faith thinks of Annie then, even though Annie, surely, should be the last thing on her mind. It is a flash of Annie, more than a thought, coming to her with the cold seeping in through her jeans, the padding of footsteps all around her.
A jumble of pictures: Annie and her belly, the fullness of it, her ice-white skin. Then a snowman, with Ernie growing inside it, as if his cells could reacquaint themselves with each other in there, huddle together to form a little curled spine; as if he needed only to be held like that in order to start again.
Birds
I was ten when I realised my father was just an ordinary man and when I realised what that meant, for the both of us.
This was before he sold the land, and moved north to take up a job in construction, and before I went to board with the Campbells down the road.
My father and I lived on a ten-acre block 30 ks out of town. There was a long gravel driveway leading up to our house, with dark macrocarpas on one side. I liked to think of myself, at the grand age of ten, as being reasonably grown up, but I was still afraid of those trees, looming high over my head like great black hands, magpies falling down suddenly out of their branches, slicing through the air just an inch above my head. They only did this when I was hurrying down the drive, alone. I don’t know if magpies can smell fear, but I swear they could tell.
I went to the small country school down the bottom of the valley; the same school my father taught at. There were slim pickings, for sure—only two teachers—but there was no doubting he was the favourite. He wore knee-high socks and shorts all year round, walking in a straight line up and down in front of the class, turning on his heel, clapping his hands. He was vaguely hopeless, which seemed exhilarating to all of us then. I held small-time celebrity status, being his son.
We had two relationships, my father and I. I called him Mr Todd five days a week, from nine to three, and he, in turn, said my name with no more emphasis, or emotion, than any of the twenty names of the other kids at school. At the end of the day I’d wait around for an hour or two, kicking a ball on the field or going through the books at the back of Miss Simpson’s classroom. When he was ready, he’d go to the car and toot the horn, twice. That was the signal. We’d move seamlessly into home-time. The passenger door would be flung open, waiting for me. And he’d be waiting, too, sitting in the driver’s seat, the engine running, his hands resting lightly on the wheel.
Even with my mother gone, we were doing all right. That’s what I thought, anyway. And then Sal Chambers came along, and all of us were set off course.
I don’t know where Sal had been before she arrived in our lives. I never got a chance to ask my father, and back then I wasn’t much interested in her at all. At first she seemed like something just on the edge of my life, like a black spot on my eye, nothing big enough to worry about but not small either. It seemed to me that she simply trickled into the house, and then all of a sudden she had filled it right up. She was everywhere I looked.
She had been a nighttime visitor before she became a day one. One night I heard her laughter spiralling down the hallway, long after I had gone to bed. I’d never even laid eyes on her before this. I didn’t know she existed. So it was her laugh that introduced her in a way. Long and high, sustained like an operatic note. At first I didn’t know what it was, and felt a thud in my chest, as if I had heard a wild animal, something calling for its life. That’s how it sounded: desperate.
This was in autumn. I know this because I remember the leaves on the ground the next day. I don’t think I felt particularly troubled, I just remember—looking down and seeing them, fluttering along in front of my feet.
*
My mother left when I was five. I hardly remember her now, just a flash every now and then of her hands, pale and freckled, or the backs of her legs as she leaned down to dry her feet after swimming in the waterhole. I can’t imagine having noticed such a thing when I was so small, but I feel certain there were slim spidery veins, bright blue, on the backs of her knees. And the light, watery and tinged with grey.
Perhaps my vision of my mother’s legs is just that—of plain, detail-less legs, just her leaning over, rubbing her foot with the towel. I know I can see that—her buttocks stretched quite flat, her taking care to dry between each toe—but that may be all it was. Perhaps I have added everything
else in over the years; those veins belonging to some other woman, the light to another day.
It wasn’t that devastating, her leaving. I was five and had just started school; felt safe there, with my father in the next room. He had always been the one who put me to bed at night and read me stories and gave me my bath. He was a hero, of sorts. He was keeping the show on the road. And my mother? I think she just couldn’t cope, hated the endless paddocks and the top-dressing planes soaring over the house week after week. I think she was unwell. Not well enough to take me with her, that is.
My father and I had been alone for five years, coping fine. And then Sal Chambers came along, bringing her laughter in the middle of the night, filling me with a sudden dread, the sound ringing down the hallway and then stopping abruptly.
I said nothing to my father about it, about what I had heard, but I knew something had changed.
It wasn’t for another week or two that Sal and I actually met. It was almost accidental, though I think my father had been planning it for that day. I had been next door, playing bull-rush with the McKay kids, and I came home earlier than I should have, after falling onto my chest and winding myself on the hard clay. To avoid the driveway and the magpies, I clambered over a series of fences, some of them barbed wire, paddock after paddock. I was snivelling a bit, my nose running, filling my mouth with the taste of salt.
Sal Chambers was sitting alone on the couch inside, a cup of tea between her hands. She looked up at me with an expression of odd weariness when I appeared in the doorway, as if in that moment the movements of her face were slowed down and exaggerated. She had mousey hair in a ponytail and wore baggy denim overalls. Her bare arms were almost as thin as mine. I must have looked alarming, the dirt from my fall having mixed with my few, humiliated tears, snot streaming down my lips. She looked at me for a second, blinking.
‘Harry,’ she said then, quite blandly, as if she had met me before, as if she knew me well.
She reminded me of a kid at school, though she must have been in her mid to late twenties. She had a smooth pale face and pointy nose. Her hair was dull and slightly limp. She was almost pretty. I remember thinking that. That compared to Miss Simpson and Mrs McKay and Mrs Campbell she was, almost, half pretty.
That autumn the winds came. Sometimes I felt that the arrival of the wind, and the arrival of Sal Chambers’ wild laugh, were one and the same. That somehow a shell had been cracked, and all the noise was pouring forth. We were not used to wind like that, especially not at that time of year; it was not normal, as my father said. It would come out of nowhere, gale force, whipping the scattered leaves into a frenzy, carrying a watering can and piece of tarpaulin, once, all the way down our drive. My father and I started tying things down with rope.
‘We should tie the bloody roof down!’ he said, grinning as if it was all a great joke. Nothing could dampen his spirits.
Sal was working at Arbuckle’s Nursery, just round the corner from the pub. I don’t know where she was living, she only ever came to our house, and as time went on it seemed she did that more and more often. She always wore overalls, denim, khaki-green, and tight little teeshirts underneath that showed the smallness of her shoulders and the top of her narrow back. Her laugh seemed quite absurd, coming out of that head and thin-lipped mouth like a roar coming out of a mouse.
My father, who had always been absent minded in a cheery, inoffensive way, seemed to totally lose his head. He was not my teacher that year—I was in Miss Simpson’s class—but when I saw him round school he had a slightly daft expression on his face, as if he was somewhere else entirely.
At home he tried to butter me up. I think he felt bad, could feel himself losing a hold on his role as a consistent, stable father. I realise now that he was actually still quite young, thirty-five at the most, and that he had a right, with or without me, to have a life too. This was beyond comprehension to me at the age of ten, and as I have said, it wasn’t that at that point it seemed devastatingly huge to me. It was just strange.
During the weekdays Sal came over every evening after she had finished work. She drove a small, beat-up hatchback that looked a little like a beetle. I would hear the clunking of the engine coming down the drive long before she pulled up in front of the house. I would feel a slight sinking in my stomach every time.
Despite her laugh, her voice was soft and girlish. She would talk to my father in the kitchen and I would never be able to hear what she was saying. It was a sweet voice, I guess, the voice of someone who would never intend to do harm. Sometimes when we ate dinner round the table she would try to talk to me, ask a question, her head bobbing slightly as she spoke. Somehow her questions seemed unanswerable, although I always did my best.
‘What do you think of this wind?’ she would say, her head wobbling slightly on her neck, her light-grey eyes surveying the room, not me.
‘That’s you, Harry,’ my father would say, grinning idiotically, pointing his fork. ‘That’s a question for you.’ He was relieved, I think, whenever she made an attempt to talk to me. I suppose he hoped we could become great friends.
*
That year I got my first real crush on a girl. Her name was Bronwyn James and she was the Campbells’ niece. She was living with them for the year because her parents had gone overseas. She was fifteen. She caught the bus with the older kids every day to the high school in town.
It was an innocent crush on my part, and utterly hopeless, of course. Bronwyn was not only five years older than me, but she had the gangly charm of a girl who looked unnervingly grown up, whose body seemed to be one step ahead of the rest of her. She had long sandy hair and so many freckles they merged with her skin, making her look almost tanned.
She took a liking to me in a maternal, abstracted sort of way.
I would see Bronwyn whenever all us kids went down to the swimming hole on Grange Road, usually on Sundays. She would be there too, often with a book, sitting on the rough clay of the bank with her knees up. She had a pale-blue swimsuit with a slight silver sheen. When she rose up out of the water, the water would fall off her in a way that it seemed to me it didn’t do with any of the rest of us. It was as if, for a moment, she was liquid too, slippery as a seal.
I don’t think my awe of her was entirely innocent, but my fascination with her body was more with the foreignness of it, the novelty factor of having a friend whose legs and chest curved like that. There was something exhilarating—something I was yet to really understand—about being in the company of someone who moved their limbs so slowly, with such deft control. She would roll her damp towel into a turban on the top of her head, her wet hair curled in its middle, and my chest would do a little hiccup inside.
‘Come sit next to me, Harry,’ she would say sometimes when I was standing, shivering in the wind, on the bank. She would share an apple with me out of her canvas bag. She felt sorry for me, I realise now, me having no mother and all.
It must have been a couple of months into my father’s relationship with Sal Chambers that I first started to grasp what an adult relationship really meant. Perhaps, as country kids, we were all especially innocent and unsophisticated. We knew what sex was, I think, but didn’t really understand that it wasn’t purely a device for breeding. Someone at school had heard somewhere that you had to have sex twice in order to have a baby. Jimmy Rogers was one of six, and we all laughed at him: that would have meant his parents had had sex twelve times. I was the luckiest of all: mine had only had it twice.
I knew that Sal slept in my father’s bed with him, and that there seemed to be a vibration, something almost electrical, in the way they moved around each other in the kitchen, as if there was a magnetic force that locked their limbs, hands, sides together, when they least expected it. I knew that much. It made me feel odd coming across my father brushing his hand, lightly, across Sal’s bottom; the way she turned and looked at him when he did it, the expression on her narrow face almost defiant.
I came across them one night long
after I should have been asleep. The wind was up again, making the whole house quake, the rose bush outside my bedroom window scratching its dry thorns across the glass. I felt agitated by the noise, and scared, though I don’t really know what of.
I got up and opened my door quietly, careful not to make it creak. It was nearly midnight and I expected my father and Sal to be asleep, but the living-room door was ajar, and a triangle of light lay on the hallway carpet. I should have turned around and gone back to bed, comforted by the knowledge that my father was still in the house, but something wouldn’t let me, and I walked towards the light, slowly and cautiously, drawn towards the golden hum like a bee.
My father and Sal Chambers were in the living room, by the mantelpiece. Sal’s elbows were resting on it, her overalls and underpants around her ankles. Her teeshirt was pulled up awkwardly, exposing one side of her back. My father was pressed hard against her. His pants were half on, half off, and the buckle of his belt jingled, flapping rhythmically against his thigh.
He was banging his whole body against her back.
Out of Sal’s mouth came a muffled crying, like an injured dog, and it seemed to me then, standing in the doorway in my cold bare feet, that Sal was in pain, and that it was my father who was causing it, it was my father who was hurting her.
*
Autumn slid into winter. The winds died down. They were replaced by frosty still days, the sky a cool blue, the grass always crisp in the morning.
Sal didn’t bring any belongings with her, she never officially moved in, but she seemed always to be around, miraculously surfacing in the morning, even if I’d never seen her arrive at night. She ate muesli for breakfast, floating in so much milk it looked like soup, and she still tried, in her strange detached way, to form some kind of friendly alliance with me. The unanswerable questions continued.