Loving, Faithful Animal Read online

  This is Exhibit A in the Museum of Possible Futures; the life that might have rolled out smooth as a bolt of satin, if she had just swung her slender legs up into that beautiful car and driven as fast as she could in the opposite direction, leaving the man with the camera far behind. Your father, he could keep the photograph.

  But she did not drive away. Instead she sold the car and spent every night of her life trying to lead your father out of the jungle, out of the mud, away from the cracks of invisible rifles, strange lights through the trees.

  When Lani was five or six, old enough to understand what the shouting meant when you did not, she would climb into your cot to curl around you like a shell—Big C little c—and tell you it would be over soon. She’d hum whatever songs she could think of—advertising jingles, songs she’d learnt in school—to drown out the shattering of plates, the thud that might be your mother’s head hitting the wall. Then it was you climbing into your sister’s bed, welcome for a year or two. Top to tail, sardines on toast, till she got tougher and her comforting was something you had to trade for, something to buy with money or favours, her share of the dishes. Then there was nothing you had that she wanted (I don’t even read those stupid vampire books anymore, dumb-arse) and she said she was tired of waking up with your fricken feet in her fricken face. Eventually you became too old for that kind of thing anyway and, at twelve, too proud. That’s how it went.

  There is a picture you have in your mind, though you’re not certain how it got there. Another photograph from the green Corvette years, maybe, but this one is in black and white: a semicircle of scraggly men standing around a large pit. From outside the photograph, you cannot see the men’s faces. Only their backs, their arms loose around each other’s shoulders. You cannot see what is in the pit. But somehow you know what is in there, and wish you did not. In the foreground, a pair of rifles are crossed, jabbed barrel-down into the dirt, making an X. One of these rifles is your father’s. This is all you know about the war; this and the panther and your mother’s face.

  After three fat cigarettes your brain feels padded with smoke, the afternoon humming with a loud, high-pitched heat. You scuff the fallen pine needles into little heaps with the heel of your shoe. Sometimes there are things left up here—beer bottles, bones, burnt pieces of hose, once a pair of grubby cotton knickers tangled in a chequered blanket—so you know it isn’t only yours, this place. But today there are just the shells from the cicadas, who have six weeks to fly around, make noise and have sex before they die—a rotten deal after spending seven years underground, doing nothing.

  Mum has a collection of them lined up along the kitchen windowsill, which Lani thinks is creepy as hell. Aunt Stell agrees, says she can’t stand to look at them, marching along with their slit-open backs. They make her feel itchy. But Mum thinks they’re lucky. For her, the entire world is split into lucky and unlucky, you and your sister included. Lani’s birthday is the fourth (unlucky) and yours is the twenty-first (lucky). It’s a certain amount of responsibility, this luckiness, looking after it as though it might wear away or stretch thin with growing.

  There are more cicada husks up in the higher branches, an easy climb even with the headful of smoke. Seven is a good number. They don’t give up their hold of the tree bark without a fight, and some of them lose a leg or two. But their remaining hook-feet catch in your T-shirt’s soft cotton and they cling there as if they know and trust you anyway.

  Riding in the bent green arms of the pine you want to find a way to keep it all, to press it flat like a gum blossom between the pages of a heavy book; the paddocks and huge sky with the final hours of December dissolving into it. When you close your eyes it’s there for a moment, perfect, but then the edges go fuzzy and it drifts away. After a while it all hurts to look at, too glaring and too empty, and no way to stop the afternoon from running out.

  You light another smoke and let the match burn down to make a midget charcoal pencil. Inside of the matchbook for a canvas.

  In art class you draw habitats. Not landscapes; habitats. Places that are waiting. Places where people or animals might eventually wander into if you can make them seem inviting enough.

  Very elegant, those trees, those hills, says Miss Dawes. But don’t you think it would all look nicer with some sheep or something?

  They’ll come later, you tell her. Something, but not sheep. Sheep always look like parasites from far away.

  Parasites?

  Yeah, like ticks. Or fleecy lice.

  I’ve never noticed that. But you’re allowed to use the whole page, you know? There’s stacks of paper back there, you don’t have to crush it all into a corner.

  Okay, you tell her, though you like to keep things small enough to scribble out, small enough to take back, if you need.

  She leans in close to study the fine crosshatching on a copse of ghost gums, whorls of night air like the feathery dark hair at her nape, pasted down now with sweat. What do you know about yourself, in these moments? Breathing her smell of forest, of cool earth, her hands stained from slapping out hunks of damp clay on a stone slab. Meant for coil pots, the clay. But the boys will roll theirs out into stumpy cocks, slimy from the work of their sweaty palms, to chase girls around the room. Barely older than Lani, Miss Dawes, but she never yells. Just wonders aloud how come the anatomy is so well-observed. Makes the blood roar up to their idiot faces.

  How about horses? she whispers conspiratorially. Galloping her hand across your page. Like you’re a child.

  Maybe horses, you shrug. Eventually.

  Okay, she says. Eventually. In their own good time, right?

  A vivid interior world, she writes. But maybe she writes that for everyone she doesn’t understand. (Look at this one, Aunt Stell says sometimes, grabbing you in a one-way hug. Too old for teddy bears, too young for wolves, hey?)

  You rip the last match across the striker strip, turn it back on the matchbook and let the flame eat the sketch. Nothing ever turns out looking true.

  A hot wind shakes your tree, the last northerly of the year. It came from inland, from the desert, and it will keep blowing on down the Hume, on into Melbourne, collecting firework smoke and radio countdowns and half-cooked resolutions on its way to the ocean, emptying it all out over the Bass Strait. Everything feels like the last, the very last, as though it’s the end of the century and not just the end of the year. The end of the world. That’s why everything alive down there in the grass is singing its insect heart out.

  Then there’s dust rising from over near the road, visible before the motorbike engine is heard, thin and waspish above the silvery cricket whir. The bike rips along the channel of chewed-down grass that runs alongside the fence. William Somebody. Healy, the mechanic’s son. His bike isn’t made for the country, and the girl hugging his back isn’t dressed for riding. She’s wearing his helmet but her arms and legs are bare, and the dress she has on is made of something wet-looking and slinky, a spangled black that’s scrunched up high on her thighs.

  It’s easy to tell, even this far away, that it’s Lani. The dress isn’t her dress, she must’ve borrowed it, and with the cherry red helmet she looks like a doll that’s had its head swapped with an action figure’s. Inside there it will smell like sweat and unwashed hair, cigarette breath and cheap aftershave.

  If she turns her bobble-head towards the pines, she’ll see your bike, leaning helpless against the foot of the tree. She’ll know you’re up there, Sneaky little shit. She won’t be able to climb up and whack you, not in those shoes. But she can be mean as cat spit, has a sixth sense for knowing what will hurt most. Looking down at your bike, the sleek almost-newness of it, you wonder how fast could you ride. Not fast enough. Nothing to do but hold your breath, scratchy pine bark biting into your skin, while you wait for your sister to see or not see.

  There is so much you could tell on her. Before Christmas she came and cut an L-shaped slit into the flys
creen of your bedroom window so she could sneak in and out at night. Mum won’t check your room, fuckface. And there are the pills she sneaks from Dad, the ones that are meant to keep him calm, which she sells to people at parties for two dollars a pop. And now this.

  You tell, she’s said, I’ll tell.

  Tell what?

  You know, she answers, bluffing—what could she know?—but it’s better safe than sorry.

  Lani and the boy pass right by, like a dream made of petrol fumes and churned-up grass.

  You’re not the only one in the world. You say it in your mind, and then you say it again right out loud, because she won’t be able to hear, You’re not the only one in the world. But your sister sails out to where the night is reaching its pink claws into the sky, and you know that soon enough she’s going to leave this place without you.

  After the sound of the engine dies away you climb down, putting a hand on your bike as though to reassure it. A couple of the cicadas have been crushed, and you brush away what’s left of them. Flakes of translucent carapace, still-clinging legs. Sorry sorry sorry, though they wouldn’t have felt a thing, wherever their new bright bodies are. And five’s okay. Five’s still lucky. They hang on the front of your T-shirt like ornaments, riding along that way as you coast home through the last of the light.

  Years from now, you will try to explain it. Lying on your back in someone’s bed, attempting to shape it with your hands so that they might be able to see you better. How sometimes—in these liminal hours, in the near-dark that falls between dog and wolf—you could see past your father’s shoulders. Past the crossed rifles and the men who stood in miserable exhaustion around the edge of the pit. You could see right into the silver and the light that moment was made of, to bodies piled on bodies. Limbs in the bulldozed dirt showing like the pale roots of monstrous trees.

  You will throw shadows on the bedroom wall, reaching up towards the high pressed-tin ceiling, trying to make yourself understood. And when it’s obvious that this will not be possible, that you do not have the words or even the shapes of the words, you will let your hands fall back to the mattress. Birds shot from the sky. You will allow them to be held.

  I don’t, you will say, want to talk about it anymore. Because you still will not know how. How in such moments you could see past your father’s shoulders, yet could not see his face.

  *

  When you pull up the roller door, Tetch is for once not standing there offering to fix anything. The house is dark and airless, no sound but the refrigerator and the fishtank filter murmuring to each other in their secret electrical language. The sifting of posters as they shed from the walls, from sweating adhesive. At the table you carefully detach your cicada passengers, raiding Lani’s nail polish to give them glossy coats of armour, shellacking them in gold, pale pink, electric blue before lining them up along the kitchen windowsill with the others, so that Mum can be surprised the next time she does the dishes. Out there in the yard she’s pulling up handfuls of thistles and having words with the rabbits. Giving them a frozen drink bottle wrapped in an old tea towel so the hutch will stay cool. From inside the kitchen you can’t hear the exact words she’s saying, but you can tell she’s using her phone voice, her best voice, the one she uses when she wants people to respect her. People or animals, whoever’s listening. The rabbits, who have both been given various names—Raffles, Shuffles, Wombat, Houdini—now spend every night up on the back porch, hidden under a green tarpaulin weighted with paint cans, safe from whatever murdered Belle.

  Try asking her what it is she talks to them about—how much can a person have to say to a rabbit?—and she’ll just make a joke out of it:

  I tell them to mind their own peas and kumquats.

  Tonight you’ll sit and watch the fireworks on TV; silver birches, Catherine wheels, skyrockets lighting up the banks of the Yarra River and the golden faces of people oohing about it. The distant bubble-wrap pop of explosions that’ll make you want to run to the windows and look.

  Too far away, possum, Mum will say. A name she hasn’t used since you were little, and you won’t be sure whether this means things are worse or better than they seem.

  During the crowd shots you’ll search the sea of upturned faces for your father, though you know he won’t be there, how he hates crowds. Mum will fall asleep in the armchair, her hand around the phone, and hours later Lani will climb in through your window, her red mouth all blurry and her eye makeup gone panda.

  Your father’s nightmares will be out of the house—finally, finally—but for a few weeks yet the three of you will wake up and wait for them anyway. Drifting around the house like lost ships: Go to bed. You go to bed. Don’t get smart.

  Some nights, in place of proper dreaming, you’ll open the curtains and look out across the darkness. Imagine yellow eyes staring back, a dusky shape slinking through the paddocks, along the windbreaks. Snuffling out the scent of your father and following it to wherever he is; straight down the highway, all the way to the city. Padding between the tramlines while everyone else is asleep.

  II. The Coastal Years

  well, i was pretty. I did use to be brave. I’m telling you. Skinny as a whippet—you could put your hands like this around my waist—and just that fast. Wipe that look off your face, girl. I’m telling you. Before I met your father. Before I …

  Yes, she can hear herself. Whine whine whine. Evelyn wraps pale ivory tissue around a trio of flock deer, their taupe fuzz wearing away in patches, giving them a look of hereditary mange. If she can only get the girls to see. See her differently. Just exactly as she had been—that’s hardly demanding a great stretch of the imagination; there are photographs, after all. Then she might be able to see herself that way. Step right back up into her old joy, her old hope, some large bright room in herself that’s been closed off these past seventeen years. That could be the start. Of something. But Ru is unconvinced and of course Lani won’t even try.

  With the family of deer safely nested in the box, she tapes closed the lid. The last of it. Though Jack’s brother came by hours ago to help waltz the naked Christmas tree out of the house, and the fallen needles threaded themselves into the weave of the stubby carpet, a trail leading from lounge to front door. These too will have to be gone by midnight, every last one, or who knows what. Evelyn hefts the candy-striped Christmas box and follows the path of needles out of the house, bumping the screen door open with a fleshy hip.

  The heat, the light today. There’s something about it. Here she is stranded, miles inland, but still it calls up the sandstone coast of her youth. The stickiness of that salt air as she walked towards the ocean baths, to the pool cut right into coastal rock. Every summer morning of her teens and into her twenty-first year. Drifting home with seawater drying on her skin, leaving delicate scuffs of salt dust, fine as baking soda beneath the fine blonde hair on her arms.

  But then maybe it isn’t the heat, isn’t the light; maybe it has more to do with Jack being gone, maybe for good this time. And this is how she knows, somewhere deep down, that it’s for good. His absence whipping the years out from underneath her, like that party trick with the tablecloth, the dishes clattering back not-quite as they had been, and she’ll have to go back to being whoever she was before the table was set. Whoever she was before he scooped her up out of the ocean baths that last time. Told her, This is it, Kiddo, today’s the day, and carried her dripping and laughing up to the stands, where waited his duffel bag filled with a tumble of work clothes and oranges from a Mildura orchard. How long since anybody called her Kid?

  She allows herself more—wallowing, Jack would call it, but it’s really too bright, too lovely to be called that, or to turn away from. The clean shock of oceanwater that rippled through her, fingertips first, as she dove from the white concrete starters’ block. No ah-ahhhing about the cold, no time to waste. Gliding an inch below the surface, fifty yards on a single breath, the day’s warmth b
eating down through the water. Playing knick-knack on her spine as the sun hauled itself higher. Knowing by something like instinct, something like sonar, where to turn; wheeling around and feeling her toes connect and flex against stony poolside, gulping in a lungful of air for the return lap.

  The swimsuits she’d owned then, she could chart the whole decade on them. A new one every year, just about. ’66 the lemon-butter yellow with pink flamingos at the hips. ’67 the emerald green two-piece with the starry thread running through. ’68 the sophisticated navy blue Jantzen with its white piping and keystone. That one she wouldn’t change even when the fashion did, she loved it that much. From age eighteen to twenty she wore it, flinging herself into the captive rectangle of ocean until finally the elastic disintegrated and the suit slumped around her brown thighs.

  Once a stingray washed into the pool overnight. It must have rode a king tide across the barrier that partitioned the baths from the open sea, and she’d dived right in before seeing it. As she glissed across the forty-yard line it was suddenly there beneath her, down on the floor of the pool, quietly lifting its edges like an egg in a pan. Evelyn doubled back over it and floated there awhile, staring down through the nine feet of water to where it rested, immense and blue-granite coloured with a constellation of white speckles. A map of a distant galaxy, it seemed. And its wings—was it right to call them wings? She didn’t know—had the span of a Chinese kite.

  How long did she hang there above it, imagining herself a silent aircraft hovering over an uncharted islet? She waited for the ray to do something, but it seemed either content enough or else resigned to a new life of enclosure. Maybe it felt safe there. Though when she came back the next morning, it had choofed off, or been forcibly removed.