Loving, Faithful Animal (2 page)

The cigarettes are your own revenge, or maybe they are something else: a come-here-you, like a fox whistle. Something that will call your father back in spite of himself. Touch the lit match to the paper, draw deep, don't cough. Don't cough. And he'll come striding up the yellow hill to slap your face. That would be the least worst thing. And still, it doesn't happen.

What have you been given to miss? More than you'll likely remember. More than the smell of pine resin and diesel. More than tooled-leather gimcracks with your name stamped in, and creatures fashioned from wine corks and Easter-egg foil; projects to keep his hands and mind placid. More than being hoisted up for a better view of the moon rabbit; more than the names for constellations, and seven slang words for
horse
. More than
this is how to eat a prickly pear
and
this is how you hypnotise a budgie
and
this is how to stave off thirst
—breaking a button from his shirt and sucking on it like a lozenge. More than knife tricks and old wives' tales and nonsense riddles—
why is a mouse that spins?
He's never read aloud from any book you can recall, has all his poems and songs and jokes stashed away by heart, to trot out whenever the occasion might call for one.

Your father. His head is a ghost trap. It's all he can do to open his mouth without letting them all howl out. Even so, you can still see them, sliding around the dark behind his eyes like a Balinese puppet show. At night he
'
ll let his guard down. Too bad for everyone. Now he's out there somewhere. Wasting his New Year's Eve in a shabby, forgetful room that has bedsheets for curtains, a mattress soaked in other men's fevers. You've seen those rooms. How is that better than being at home? Those sad seedy places that Mum has dragged him out of before, you and Lani waiting in the car. Bored brainless in the backseat, sucking barley sugar, reading stolen doctors'-waiting-room magazines—
20 Ways I Beat The Change!!
—not understanding how she always hunted him down eventually. Not understanding why she hunted him down at all. Weeks of nothing, then the phone would ring one morning with a tip-off, and she'd be thrown into action. Saying to forget about school, I need you both today. Needed for what, exactly, neither of you could say—to hold on to a fistful of change for the parking meter, keeping watch for the inspector? She'd do her lipstick in the rearview mirror and fluff up her hair—
Okay, girls, cross your fingers
—before clipping up the stairs of a mean-looking building.

Silly bitch, Lani would say, after Mum had been swallowed up by the rooming house. It's so embarrassing; he
'
s just going to belt her around again.

Watching her in those moments, with her clotted mascara and worn-down heels, it was impossible to imagine her ever being young, impossible to imagine swimming trophies and a modelling portfolio with Vivien's. Most of the proof of that life was elsewhere—pawned or held ransom
up north
, which meant The House I Grew Up In, which meant Grandparents. These people who were only feathery handwriting in birthday and Christmas cards, padded envelopes containing presents of glittery stationery and books you'd read years ago. The word
Merewether
crouched in the return address like a dangerous spider.
That Merewether mansion
, Dad called it—though it wasn't, Mum insisted, really wasn't a mansion—that's where everything was.

All she had to show now were an arctic fox coat and a photograph of her in the driver's seat of the famous green Corvette, a few years before she sold it to pay off a loan. The Corvette is gleaming, cicada-coloured, its cream panels like wings and the soft top folded down. You're there, a slight swell under her orange kaftan, baby Lani sitting up in her lap like a doll. In the photograph, you cannot tell what is coming. And neither can she. She is laughing behind her Audrey Hepburn sunglasses, oblivious to the time when she will use them to hide bruises and nights without sleep.

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 flyscreen 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.