It’s a small town edged with the rattle of blue trucks, the 3am blue that you can’t dream in, the nights made of loads being towed to a distance, to songs on a station no one listens to. The shudder of all those loads makes the outline of four walls when you close your eyes, an echo of your bedroom, silver and riding that muted clatter through the night, to towns you’d throb to visit, but you’re too small, you’re too fixed, and no one. And how do they even hold up? – those dark linked beds, those tremors of jointed metal, when it sounds like the wheels could detonate on one stone fleck, drop the deck in a sparking slide, the steel panels unbolt and gouge the road towards you in long symphonic shivers. You expect to hear that: you lie still, wait, your house on the crossroads. When it’s deep night the trucks don’t brake and the far-off quake of them starts up in your thorax, rises gritty in your trunk to pinpoint your offcentre heart, shakes the house in apocalyptic gusts, then moves on, a bass note of disintegration, tracked into nowhere, the last pulse of them a telescopic flutter that leaves you little but a blue trace over your scalp. Cold with questions. Months since you met him, the residue of sound turns bluer, like a fingertip down the spine’s machinery, like the quiver of a dress come undone when only you are barefoot. Half alive under lit-up eyelids you travel the noise that goes on hauling dark apart.
There’s no husband in this story. He’s not here because he’s not real. You knew it the day you married him, the days before that, when he pulled up in his wagon, worked the horn with the heel of his hand, his talk like smoke that trailed out the window, warm, habitual, but nothing to do with you, as he took you to the same places he’d always taken you, parked in the same degree of shadows lowered by the always-there trees to edge his hands through clothes onto skin in the same slow-breathing fumbled sequence, so when he finished you could drowse watching fern-shade and letting the trickle of him fade like his thudding dull need was never there in the first place. So there’s no husband in this story. There is you, there is the man, there are the passing trucks. That’s all. That’s all the story can hold. You know it when you get up, like the house has already set out a map of your possible steps, walk to your kitchen where you can see the crossroads, your limits laid out in four corners. You know it through your sleep like the ripple of pale walls. You know it when you reach for the edges of the story and lay your hands flat on the ways that it can’t end well.
There’s so much this story cannot be about – like the kids doing show-and-tell when you’re rostered on for your morning of classroom help, and they clamber to the front of the room, on a slalom through knees and sneakers, a wobbly leapfrog of knocks and laughs, and they get to the spot on the carpet-square where they hold up their cut-outs of current affairs, ragged events they’ve snipped from the paper, their sticky fingerprints crinkled to black, and they tell, in their own mock-grownup drone, what is going on in the headline, the picture, they list who has died or been saved, but mostly they chant through the victims, they like the stories with a high body count, aware that there’s big news out there, news with ammo, news with blood, news with repercussions, and angles the camera revolves around in strafed red flash, news happening in x-rays in worlds where cities are dyed night-vision green and magnified homes are hit with cross-hairs that bomb them shapes no one lives to see. And even the children know this, as you squat on the pygmy plastic seats and help them star-shape foil sheets and necklace their crayoned ornaments with itchy strings, as you listen to them stumble their spelling words, their mouths on the consonants spitty and back-tracked, as you lower their wax-etched portraits into thin blue tubs so the skeleton picture sticks, as you push-pin their charts of feelings in primary colours to the hessian walls, they know that your story is nothing, that your place in this classroom doesn’t count, and tomorrow you will not be listed, you will not show up, but they’ll still show-and-tell and the refugees will starve at the chainlink borders, the protesters will be gassed in grey squares, the revolutions will run software with faces of the lost outlined in red glories, and they will have forgotten who you are – and so they should.
But there’s no way the story can’t hold his kid – though you keep yours safe off the edge of the narrative. Because you know from her face’s flat ratio, its pale bulk and thick-cornered eyes, from the lovely moony colourblind smile she gives when he slots out the handle on her schoolbag, so she scampers with it like she’s twitching a puppy on a leash, tugs it like it might pounce or yelp, you know you are unforgiveable. But her love for everyone is loose-mouthed, so she bestows it on you, her smile with its blob of pink tongue, its gaping glee for the air swishing leaves on her t-shirt, for the pasted treasure she tows from art therapy in crooked glue-gunned struts, for the new blue treat of her special shoes, which clump her through the autumn crunch. Downie, mutters your kid one day, so you have to pull him to the side of the path, to the outskirts of the story, into a sudden hunch where you hiss, red-faced, don’t you dare say that. But don’t you dare? You dare much worse. You go on daring, unspeakable want. But she likes you, and she likes to look close, her wet eyes opal under big glass rings, her fingers wombling your cheekbones, poking the paint of your lower lip, so you crouch to let her, and she tries out words, but her teeth are deaf, and barked in her throat her loud voice blots them, sluggish. She paddles your face and nods up at her daddy, gives him a big smile, rubbery and brimming. You are beyond selfish. She’s as close to an angel as you will ever see.
And doesn’t it happen from a distance, at first – so he’s something embodied in a series of muscles through eyelash, spasmodic summer-bright blinks. The miles barely let him into focus. The road is long and barely lets him take the shape of a man. And you start to think something, but the heat drawls the road into waves . . . and you never finish the sentence. It doesn’t stop you doing what you’re here to do, what you’re meant to do, what you always, always. You pick up your kid. You do. That’s what you do. You walk to school, you hold the hand you’re meant to hold, walk holding it home. It’s not an afternoon with the stain of his shape. It’s a bloodbeat, a flicker, less. Isn’t that the way it is? And other things must happen that day – there surely must be a streak of something turning in the recalled light if you really stop and look. He wasn’t that important, that crucial. There were lots of other things. Like maybe you washed down the kitchen floor, sloshing the toeprints with citrus bubbles, the sponge on its rickety plastic stem, which you lean on, fizzing the detergent from its pores, because the floor is a collage of footfalls you feel on your sole-heat, your dinnertime trail round the benches tacky with a serenade of daily grit. Or maybe you planted something, clawed a neat rut in the raised bed that you’d left for seasons, maybe you pressed in a tendril of something, with ribbons of nerve-end or small crocheted leaves, maybe you moistened it, with drizzles of irregular lukewarm sputter from the parched lime hose, maybe you even rubbed your thumbs and prayed. Or maybe you wound down the wire washline and stretched out a bleached load by tight-pegged corners, reached blindfolded by sun into the tub to scrabble up the plastic clamps in their rainbow colours and thought it was a miracle you grabbed exactly the right count to pin to the very end of the wash, to the last beloved limp blue sock. There are miracles. They happen in your life. While you’re standing in the dry hexagonal yard, and washing flaps at the bands of your memory, come clean of all the pieces you’d like to forget.
You want to make the story about three things. You cut home via intermediate school, and stare at the shimmer of three things and want to make them into a story and take it across town and tell it, direct and wet and illuminated, into the skin of his face. The three things are: 1) you see a dark boy kneeling by the white H of goal on the rugby field and a girl is crouching over him, elbowing her breeze-messed hair while she concentrates, guiding the warm chrome stamen of an earring in through his lobe, which is fiery with homemade holes, while he tries not to flinch by gazing at her jaw in the swing of sunlight interrupted by hair and tenderness, and when she giggles you can see
it ripple with half-wanting to hurt him more. And: 2) you see a girl, and she’s different but the same, and she’s holding a boy’s foot in her chequered lap where they perch on the low rail that is blanched log and jutting nail, and she’s painting his roman sandal, dabbing a brush in a vial of Twink and stroking words along the leather where they mingle with dirt and halt at the buckle. And: 3) you see a boy and he’s cartooned his fist with a face, crossed eyes and a grin round his knuckles, so when he sneaks up to the girl-he-will-not-admit-he-likes he squawks it with black-lined gobbles, poking it puppet-style into her getaway squeal for a goofy kiss. And they’re all in uniform, and that makes it somehow a sweeter and a crueller blue and you want him to know – even now you should just walk there, turn back across town and tell him. Stand on his doorstep, empty-handed, say, I tried to walk a different way so I didn’t see you, so I wouldn’t pass you. But that didn’t work and now I have three blue things and they’re not a story but they’re what we need to know.
And do you really want to help? – when you go to her class, you sign up as aide, and you squat by the art table helping her shingle strings with thin white corkscrews of shell, because she’s been to the beach with him, and you wonder as you knot in the spiralled pieces, the bone-smooth rings where the soft-clawed animal rises to the broken lip, you wonder what he would taste like, standing in the coastal trash, the no-man’s-land of black weed, where he’d wait until her head was turned and his hand would track sand across your neck, collecting a tide of tingled secrets, and his mouth would pick a dizzy second to risk a kiss fishlined with hair. But no, you do, you do want to help, so you focus. The project is for her mother – and you’ve seen her mother, who sometimes manages to fit in a Friday 3pm and turns up in lycra with hi-vis ticks and a bracelet of digits to tell her how many steps she’s burnt, and straps the kid in a space-age trolley, an offroad aerodynamic pram, and is already running before she’s cleared the grounds, dodging through other parents’ scuffed-shoe lassitude, half hellos and nods of post-school laze, a slalom of goal-setting elbows and cardio intensity and bodycon tights, her kid’s legs bobbing from her canvas all-weather cradle, chrome at the high-stress joints. That’s her mother: targeted and beautiful, and just because she packs the kid up so quick you shouldn’t think that she’s ashamed, because who are you to judge. You’re what’s wrong with the story, not her. And the little girl wants to surprise her mother, and she flops her palms with delight at your network of shells, your threading of calcified stars so clever and clattery, and under the ceiling fan the crop of her hair is shuffled with puffs of cool and she can’t even shoe-tie, you know, you’ve seen her with the mother, who is busy and sighs to double back and kneel down to finish her daughter’s laces with quick tough yanks that won’t slip this time, so you hold her wrists to guide her through loops, you splice with her bungling fall-behind fingers, and then you hold the spray up and the long links twinkle and circle and clack. In her smile her tongue lolls with pure bliss. You’re what’s wrong with the story. Nothing to show, less to tell.
The weather wants to help you stop – it levels the town with rain, silvers the crossroads with nowhereness. The names on the signs turn liquid, erased, headlights only heighten the blur. You back the car out, to get your boy, along a gully of flooded grass. The weather wants to help you. But the school is a gridlock, there’s nowhere to park, the traffic crawling in the backwash of half-light, the windshields flushed with rhythmic glare, so you head for the pitch but as soon as you’ve pulled in you know it’s a bad move, the wheels in the mud flux, deep. But you leave it, run in to find your kid, and race in the downrush back to the car, the rain a tumble of cold off plastic and down your spine. You can’t get traction. You know it. You knew it. You get out and flail and hump at the brake lights, grunting as if you could hope to heave it, your sandals sinking into the slush in a sloppy skid. Until he sees you. And then he’s directing you through rain, bending his torso to the car rim, and waving you to rev, and the bogged-in tyres are somehow delivered to grip. So what else is there then, when they’re so soaked, but to offer to drive them. The weather won’t stop you. And do you take them back to your place, and towel down the kids and switch on the TV, do you lead him out to the shed, where the window has been painted over, so pigment spills the grooves where you pilot his hands, an oily indigo speckling the skin where you usher him deep-breathing under your skirt, a shadowed blue where you stifle his wet touch, getting lacquered with his tongue, leaving details, like paint sucked back onto the brush, his jaw for the asking, vibrato, like the picture coming apart between your hips, and backing into the stacked-up shelves, the tins of things you could use at school, the tints and resins dripped and welded, cans of sultry colour and gloss, you could tip on the art bench and flex there, fingerpainting poison. Do you? Because that’s the kind of thing you would make up.
Before you married you needed white shoes. But you couldn’t find any in your hometown. So you drove to the next town, the town after that, and after that further, on a white-shoe search. It seemed to take weeks, driving solo with just the thought of white shoes trailing a sunset, your lone route stretching, steered for a horizon of possible shoes where the lineup of shop girls would shake their heads, sorry, and you’d have to search further still. And sometimes you thought you’d never turn homewards, the journey would just veer on and on, the next town stocking white shoes but not in your size, and the one after that selling only platinum, cream. But then you did find them. And when you found them they cost so much you rang your fiancé to ask if that was a price you could afford. And he told you he loved you so spend what you need. You almost let him in the story for a second. You almost wished he could always feel real. But when you were all put together in white and the long white day was almost done, he said, keep on the white shoes while we do it, so we can get our money’s worth. And now sometimes when you can’t sleep you unpack the white shoes from their tissue and you put them on and lie in bed like they’d float you feet-first down the distant roads they came from. You’re not careful anymore what you wish for.
Where’s it all going, all those loads in the blue night – who is it needs so much? Why do we? Why do we? You lie and listen to the din of the trucks, out on the brink where it thins to a muffled chime. Who is following that hydraulic odyssey?
Only you. Only you.
But how is it then you don’t hear the truck that leaves the road, that takes the shoulder, and ends on the low grass slope up to your house. It is waiting when you get up in the morning, when you stand in the kitchen by the crossroads lookout, a silver hulk braked on a slant in a disbelief of light. And how can it stay there stranded, no one coming to hook it up, to claim it, to ease it steaming back down to the road? How does it? But it does. And by the afternoon, when you’ve called it in, you’ve tried to track the company, you’ve phoned the police, and it’s still not been moved, you go out to the cab and climb up the first metal step, balance on the second. How can it not be locked? So you manoeuvre in, and slide channelled vinyl, you think about taking up the main seat, you stroke your soles along the pedals, your fingers play the bolts of the wheel. You look for clues, you look for notches. You turn the dial of the radio, waiting for love songs: there’s a blue everafter of sound. The windshield has a silky fringe, which shimmies at the finest hint of direction.
if there is no shelter
remove yourself to a place of safety if possible
The last time I went to the white chairs it was raining – the kind of thin rain you barely feel. The rain meant less tourists, although some were still gathered, in their bright zippered parkas and aerodynamic soles, taking photos, their selfies awkwardly solemn. It’s the wheelchair they want in the background, and the baby seat, its fabric sprayed so white it looks petrified, its hard straps like wing joints. But it’s a bad angle, tough to get both in shot: the tiny capsule, on its scant-grass bed, will vanish in the legs of all the other empties – the office swivel on its five-wheeled star, the barstool, the
deckchair, the white cane colonial. I don’t offer to help. And no one asks. On one visit some woman had a child with her who wanted to slalom through the rows of chairs, who saw no reason not to skip up the unroped aisles and wriggle into place like a game where the music stopped. She danced over the baby seat in hot-pink gumboots, a leapfrog her mother’s lurch was not in time to halt. So the woman had no choice but to weave through the queue, head down, fish the child from her clamber among seats, hissing in a language I didn’t know but could still tell she was sorry in. I didn’t say anything. I let her yank the child away, one-handed, kicking in its heart-print coat.
use common sense, keep calm, and follow
any directions given
My father drives cabs full of tourists like that. He’s worked cabs in this city his whole life. It’s a shabby job, he knows it, and to compensate he is all class, my dad, slicked back, well-trod, soft-spoken, a gentleman behind the wheel. He gets fares full of sightseers, who slump in the backseat and vent about the urban mess they’ve witnessed. The so-called Rebuild Tour is like a cruise around a war zone. It’s a ghetto, they tell him, a dead pool. They’d thought it was recovering; they’d thought, from the brochures, it was rallying, reconstructing, slapping high-rise life back up. He picks them up from the pop-up mall, where they’ve tried to contribute to the regional economy, but end by just sulking over virtuous local-ground coffee, the wind bearing down through the overpriced bunkers. They feel compassion, but also ripped off. It’s like booking a luxury break in a carpark. If they’ve been pre-quake then their memories are boarded up, or worse, they trek round cold squares following the stars on the foldout map to find rubble and scars. They don’t recognise yesterday, its landmarks crushed. The gouge through the Cathedral roof is like a hole straight through God.
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