Headspring Volume 1

by Headspring Press

  He was like that, Rabbi Batt. A bit like the Honey Monster I saw on TV, with springy hair sprouting from his eyebrows and ears and hands. He had large, sad, brown eyes which seemed to see round all the worst kind of corners, and accept what he found there. He was so tall he hardly fitted through our front door.

  "It's an old house, Rabbi," Aunty Yael told him, apologetically. "People were smaller then, I think. I blame McDonalds."

  Rabbi Batt looked as if it was a bit of an adventure, anyway, this exploration of people's houses; this excavation of their grief. He could fold up like a telescope, if his job required it.

  Mother and Aunty Yael made the Rabbi tea in the best china teacups. They served him honey cake, which he grasped with surprisingly delicate fingers. He grasped me, in fact, in surprisingly delicate fingers, studying my photographs – especially the one at the beach with mum and Aunty Yael, me caked in mud, and Levi so covered in sea and sand he looked like a Yeti – and the one where I was trying to do a handstand, which Rabbi Butt held upside down and squinted at, in case I had a better view of the world that way. Like me, he was always looking for better ways to view the world.

  He studied another one; I was pursuing Levi across the lawn, waving his lead above my head like a lasso. His hands fluttered over photographs of my father – already seeping into sepia, as if the images knew that he was gone, and had started to let go of the colours which made him live.

  I wish I'd known this Rabbi on top of the earth, and pretended he was my dad; he was as warm, and hairy as Levi; his eyes looked like squashed, black currants, disappearing into his dough face when he laughed. Instead, I could only peer through the curtain of night, and day, and maybe.

  I watched as he separated all the strands of my life. He combed out the sticky bits; lanced the nastier pimples of misery and pain; then gave me back to my mother and aunt as a boy, renewed. Rediscovered, if not reborn. The essence of me, if not the blood or the longing or the bones.

  He understood lots of things, Rabbi Batt, even my dog. Poor Levi! Who lost one master, then another, and had no-one to cry to.

  When he howled, and yowled, in his animal pain, mother shouted at him, and told him to shut it, or he'd end up in Dog Food.

  "That bloody Mutt," Aunty Yael called him, when he yelped, or made that low, terrible groaning deep in his throat, like a wolf giving birth. But they were stuck with him now. Sacred to my father, then equally sacred to me, perhaps they feared the retribution of the dead if they disowned him. They didn't see how beautiful he was, in all his wretched noise and bounce, banging about the garden all crazy with loss.

  But what would happen to Levi now, proud, hairy leader of the Levites, cast into the wilderness of rejection and hate? Lapping his bitter garden, launching himself against the decaying fence posts like a Batt out of hell?

  He started to snarl at mother and aunty. He rolled his eyes when they emptied food, and accusation, into his dish, relegated to the back garden now, banned from the comforts of the house. He scraped the ground with his long, curving claws, like a wolf testing its freedom in the deep, frozen forests of Siberia. He growled, long and low at the back of his throat, when they insulted his love and intelligence.

  "You are just a dog," they told him. "A wicked dog. The dog who killed our beloved little boy."

  They didn't understand that a dog is a bundle of hope, and affection, and dreams just like anyone else. They didn't understand that in condemning my dog, they condemned me; to a screech of misery as thin and wretched as witch's claws, raking my heart.

  There were meant to be seven chief mourners at the funeral, picked from the heart of the family. But we could only manage Mother, Aunty Yael, Uncle Samuel – plucked briefly from the diaspora – and Grandmother Cohen, who left a trail of tears and black lace all the way from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, melodramatic in her mourning.

  There was meant to be a ripping of the shirts of the seven mourners, to symbolise the loss. But Aunty Yael put paid to that. "Ripping the kriah?" she told Rabbi Batt. "No way is anyone ripping my kriah. The boy'll be in the ground soon enough – with his poor, unfortunate father – and that's enough destruction for one lifetime, shirt or no shirt."

  I liked that about Aunty Yael. She never would be told what to do. I worried about my mother, though, as she swayed in the door of the synagogue, her face all white with the suds and lather of loss. She had become insubstantial by then, her healthy flesh eaten away by the tortures within. Her face had aged, but I wanted her to stay the little, laughing mother I recalled from my first days on the earth – forever young; eternally loving.

  Perhaps she had simply lost too much. I chose to leave her, as she was already struggling on slippery ground. How could I now, then, expect her not to fall?

  And so they cried for me, their tears falling thick and bitter, squeezed like beads from a lemon – sour, and real, and hurting.

  "We have all lost someone dear to us," said Rabbi Batt, "or know someone who has lost someone dear to them."

  I watched Aunty Yael's shoulders heaving up and down, a collapsing vision in her finest black silk, and knew that she was calling for her dead brother. Old atrocities and young atrocities; I looked at Grandmother Cohen, and saw that she was seeing something quite different, in a death-soaked German field a very long time ago.

  As for me, I thought my father would finally be there, waiting to greet me. But as they lowered me into the earth, my excited spirit sparking out to meet him, I found only the flat, black planks and hollows of eternity, which swallowed me whole.

  I wished Levi was there, then. Not to bark his yo-yo-yo hello, or thump his whiskery tail against the pews, or slobber Grandmother Cohen on the nose – they never had allowed his love – but to run mad-dog through the congregation, bowling them over with the power of his huge, blustery, plates-of-meat pain. They could make a film about him, if they wanted – American Werewolf in Tel Aviv, starring a sweet dog turned savage with loss, launching himself repeatedly at the alter, trying to fling himself through the veils separating life and death, to get to the other side, to his loved ones, to me. For me to rescue him from a world which could no longer use him, or even tolerate him, let alone love him.

  The people would scatter, terrified, like petals on the wind. And laughing Levi, shuddering from the wet of his nose to the tip of his tail, would scent me then, beyond the final curtains; waiting to bury my face in the hairy taste and smell of him. Bonded, fur and skin, together at last.

  But Levi didn't come. Rabbi Batt laid out his words in rows and columns, and the congregation shuffled and coughed and wrung their hands and cried. They buried me beside my father, and it would have been nice to touch him, but we were beyond touching. The words were the merest tickle on our paper skin. They tried to breathe a life we could not use into our empty lungs, crumpled and deflated, by then, like soggy plastic bags. They tried to kiss us better, with their love. But it was all for them, then, not for us. For us, it was over. For them, it had just begun.

  It was over apart from Levi, I suppose, who chose to carry on where we all left off. Not that 'chose' is the right word. He didn't really choose to leave his love and his manners behind him, falling helter-skelter into the void. I think he was pushed.

  My mother changed after the funeral. As she grew whiter, and calmer, and more ominously silent, Levi began to pace the perimeter of the garden, equally ominous; his belly slinking low, tickling the ground.

  As mother's visits to the back garden became surreptitious, and less frequent – it got to a point she was almost throwing Levi's food out the back door, hurled like a missile, the better to insult him – my lovely wolf learned to roll his eyes and flatten his ears tight against his head, laughing a laugh of hatred, and revenge. Separation made him keen; it sharpened his dog senses to a lethal point. As my mother and aunty mashed hatred into his paltry rations – "It's your fault he's dead!" Aunty Yael would cry – Levi smacked his lips and clawed the ground, needing, hurting, waiting for his time to come.
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  They never saw how beautiful he was, that was the problem. They never understood that he, too, had lost too much. Rabbi Batt knew. I could tell. He was the only one who could get anywhere near my dog, in the end.

  I saw his black-currant eyes squeezed with worry and wonder, on his visits, as he cupped the head in his enormous hands, smoothed down the hairy flanks which shook, violently, at the merest touch of kindness.

  "A noble dog," he said, nodding gravely, as mother stared – blank as a new sheet of paper – and Aunty Yael made faces behind the dust-streaked window.

  "Devil of a dog," she muttered. "Always was, always will be, mad as a Sinai snake."

  He was just so easy to blame, you see. He didn't look like a coconut any more, he looked like an increasingly derelict werewolf. Nobody bothered, or dared, to walk him. Aunty Yael started muttering about the Dog's Home, or putting him down. But still she feared retribution from some kind of God if she disposed of the adored object; the beast so beloved of her dear departed brother and nephew.

  It would be, after all, a sacrilegious act. A betrayal, and a desecration, and a murder when, let's face it, there had been far too much of all of them, one way or another.

  It was like The Picture of Dorian Grey. Levi lived out all the raging loss and horror that my mother refused to show. As she grew paler, and quieter, and more contained, as the days passed – reacquiring her old beauty – so my dog grew fat on the feelings she tossed into his yard, like so many old bones. He gorged on her hatred, and swelled to terrifying heights in her imagination. He swallowed every hateful scrap she refused to own, and became her monster.

  But how could she let him go? When he allowed her to keep on keeping on, in the only way she knew how?

  In the end, Levi made his own decision. One day – a day my mother forgot to feed him – he simply gathered up his legs, gaining momentum up the side of the house, launched himself at the front gate, and cleared it in one gigantic leap.

  My mother and aunty, examining roses in the front garden, couldn't believe it. It was the first time I can ever remember Aunty Yael being lost for words. She sat down heavily on the front step; mother looked glazed, and oddly impressed. It simply wasn't possible for a dog to scale a seven-foot gate, barely even brushing its tips with his hairy legs. Was it?

  I watched him go, haring off down the familiar old road and banging round the corner – his legs spraying out around him like tentacles – and remembered how I spent so many hours trying to climb onto his back, and ride him round the garden, my sweet, long-legged Levi with his coconut head and laughing eyes.

  It had never worked, then. But here he was, racehorse at last, clearing the highest hurdle in the whole of the field, and I wished I could have been clinging to his back, feeling at last that burrowing wind in my hair, and the muscles flexing beneath me, and the breath of my friend coming in warm, living spurts of joy, as he galloped on home.

  About the Author

  Wendy Riley migrated to Australia from England in 1990, and has a background in journalism, having worked as senior reporter on Windsor & Slough Express and Windsor & Slough Observer in the mid eighties, then as news editor on Movie & Video Magazine, in London, in the late eighties. Wendy has had a variety of jobs in Australia, including social services and admin roles, and is now running a landscape business with her husband. Wendy is currently working on two novel manuscripts and a short story anthology.

  ######

  The Point

  Mark Smith

  Margaret Harrigan pushed open the door of the bar and stood in the light. A dozen faces turned to look, momentarily distracted from the bank of televisions showing horse races taking place somewhere out in the ether. Had the drinkers been able to see her eyes in the glare they would have registered a mixture of pity and shame. As the sun inched its way across the continent, Margaret thought, the sad eyed punters followed, looking for a get out bet on the trots at Harold Park, or the dogs somewhere out west. She understood the symmetry of despair formed by the betting window, the bar and the ATM by the door.

  "Ya got the wrong day Margaret. Cup Day's not for a month yet."

  It was Evan Cooper. And what he implied was true; the only time Margaret ever ventured in here was to place a $2 bet on some no-hoper in the Cup. It made her feel part of something that otherwise made no sense at all.

  Margaret stepped in and felt the soft vacuum of the door shut behind her. The brief distraction over, the drinkers returned to the TVs but Evan walked over to her.

  "How's Stan goin' Maggie?" He asked.

  "Terrific Evan, apart from the dying of cancer bit of course. How do you think he's going?" Her voice was strong but tired.

  "Ease up Maggie. I was just askin'. You know, if there's anything I can do…"

  "Sure Evan. How about you drop around tonight and give him a bath. Dry him, try to get him to eat something and then carry him to bed. That'd be terrific." She stood close enough to smell the cigarette smoke on his clothes.

  "Okay, okay. I understand."

  "I doubt it Evan. But let's not linger on your inadequacies as a friend. I've come here to ask where I can buy marijuana in town."

  A deep silence fell on the room. For the first time Margaret realised the TVs were all muted, creating the strange vision of energy and movement without sound. A couple of the younger punters laughed through their noses and gazed studiously at their beers.

  Evan took her by the arm and led her to the corner furthest from the bar. "What on earth are you on about Maggie. Pot?" He was incredulous. "What do you want that for? And what made you think you'd find some here?"

  "Don't patronise me Evan. I want to buy some for Stan and I've got no idea where to get it. I figured I'd find the biggest collection of no hopers in town, and here I am."

  "Since when's Stan been into drugs?"

  "Into drugs? He lives on the bloody things Evan. Compared to what he's taking pot's pretty tame I'd reckon."

  "All right. But you won't find any here. Why don't you ask some of that mob that surf the Point? None of those bastards have got a job but they all seem to get by somehow. Stan'd know them, he's surfed with them for years."

  Margaret eyed him with a look Evan mistook for contrition then turned her back and walked to the door. She opened it and shoved the door jam in place, again flooding the bar with natural light. She turned to address the darkness. "Go home to your wives and girlfriends you sad bastards. Christ alone understands why they'd be waiting for you but there's no accounting for stupidity."

  Then she disappeared into the radiance of the bright afternoon.

  *

  Stan had taken to dozing on the couch by the window after lunch. He watched the changing moods of the sea and followed the patterns of the weather, the fronts that pushed up from deep in the Southern Ocean, turning the water to a maelstrom of white caps, exhausting themselves against the rocks of the Point.

  When the fronts had passed and the days were soothed with warm air from the interior, Stan felt the northerly thread its way through his body, warming his blood, touching his ribs as they rose and fell with each breath. It moved inside him, pushed him to believe his body was still capable of paddling out into the feathering peak off the Point.

  Sometimes, asleep in the warmth of the afternoon, he found himself dropping into the bowl of that familiar wave, the arcing turn off the bottom, the tapering wall beckoning ahead of him. Then he would wake, his crumbling body aching, his bones pushing too close to the skin.

  The nights were worse but not for lack of sleep. Sleep was an express train speeding him to his end. Another nine hours lost. But if he was awake, time slowed. It was an old steam train stopping all stations. It was more painful being conscious but he was alive. Most nights he woke anyway, listening to the house creak and move while he pushed the pain out to the edge of his senses.

  He knew, even in the dark, which way the wind was blowing, knew by the noise or lack of it. The westerly pushed the wisteria against the side of the ho
use, hitting the weatherboards and scraping the spouting. The milder south easterlies tinkled through the wind chimes under the verandah. The easterlies, the bastard winds that would blow for a week, moved everything sideways and irritated like lifting nails. But the northerlies blew right through the house, intent on making their way to the water, pushing into the face of the waves, holding them up all the way along the line as they tapered off the Point.

  This afternoon Stan was dozing on the couch and Margaret was kneading dough for scones in the kitchen. There was a knock at the door. Margaret opened it to find a young woman looking around nervously. Her hair was dark and unkempt, her skin tanned and peerless. Margaret registered the nose stud, the pierced eyebrow and the top of a tattoo where the tee shirt slipped off her shoulder. Two years ago she wouldn't have opened the door but Stan's illness had forced her to re-evaluate people. She saw through facades, through the leaves and vines that hid the pity of friends. She saw their hearts, open or empty.

  "Hello luv. What can I do for you?" Margaret looked at her outstretched hand, covered in flour and dough, and laughed. Without a moment's hesitation, the girl took her hand and shook it.

  "I'm Gracie. I live up around the corner on Anderson Street. Just moved in last month."

  "Yeah, I've seen you walking down to the Point with your board. Come in and meet Stan."

  "I've heard a lot about him. Legend of the Point and all that. Understand he's been crook though," she said as she stepped through the door into the kitchen.

  "Cancer luv. Prick of a disease. It takes all the wrong people." Margaret spoke casually over her shoulder as she led Gracie through to the lounge.

  "Stan," she said quietly. "We've got a visitor. Young lass from up the road. Gracie."

  Stan smiled and struggled to his feet. "I know you," he said, nodding his head toward the telescope directed at the Point. "Red board, probably about six four. Goofy footer. You're not a bad little surfer."