Loving, Faithful Animal (3 page)

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-ahhh
ing about the cold, no time to waste. Gliding an inch below the surface, fifty yards on a single breath, the day's warmth beating 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.

Nothing quite like that will ever happen again, she's sure—not now, not here. How could it? This long-reaching emptiness, grabbing right into you; nothing beautiful or unlikely could sneak up on you here. You'd see it coming, kicking up dust from miles away, and by the time it got here it would already look spent, secondhand. Only the cruelty is astonishing, only the toxic boredom twisting imaginations just as the wind twists the cypress. The sight of Belle, strewn through the yard … She shivers.

Before Jack, she'd believed she would always live on the coast, at the lacy green edge of things. Was that so much to want? Evelyn feels dried-out here, older than her forty years. The last time she saw a stingray it was something dreadful, a grotesque little flaunt of exoticism. A woman at the post office carrying a souvenir handbag from Thailand, the ray's skin dried to hard leather. The white diamond-shaped cluster of tiny, bony pearls where the dorsal fin would be. Had been. Fitting, she thinks now, though the irony escaped her at the time.

It's very unique, she'd said to the woman, and the woman—orchestrator of fundraisers for the PTA, CFA, ETC.; Ev couldn't remember her name—smiled back at her with something like pity.

Well, a thing's either unique or it isn't, she'd said back over her shoulder, then moved up to the counter to collect her package.

The garage door goes up with a bit of a struggle, a bit of a screech. It's neater in there than it was this morning, Tetch having wrought a rough sort of order on the chaos. That was in keeping with the natural law of things; Jack busted things up and his brother fixed them. Like a European folktale, something with ravens and black forests and woodsmen.

Clever with his hands, Tetch. What's left of them. Does she think about them, his hands, what they would be like? Sometimes. Just curiously. Well, anyone would. She's never known him to have a woman, but she supposes there must be some things the man keeps to himself, in that warren of broken radios and hurt birds and obsolete encyclopedias. Maybe an awful lot, even in this town. Maybe especially in this town.

Watching him lope across the lawn this morning, she was struck by just how un-Jack he was.

Your father, was he more like you or more like …? she'd once started to ask her husband, and then thought better of it. There was no telling. There was never any telling, besides the look he got sometimes. The slight twitch at the side of his mouth. A stiffness to his hands. Palms pressed down flat upon the tabletop. As if he could feel something trembling there in the wood, the way you might lay your hand to a rail line to know whether a train was coming. Or measure the distance of an oncoming storm by the seconds between the thunder and the lightning (or was it the other way around?).

He'd cock his head as if listening. It chilled her. She could never hear a thing.

Tetch (
Les
, she reminds herself,
Les
) seems fashioned of different stuff. Well he is, really. A different mother—a fling, she must've been—who went and got herself shut away over some display of hysterics. Accidentally-on-purpose running the car off the road outside Inverloch, Les just a tiny thing strapped into the back. He turned up on a school night, as Jack told it, with the clothes he was wearing and a half-bag of Twisties the careworker had bought for him.
All he could say was sorr
y
, sorr
y
, sorry
. Six years old, only a few months younger than Jack but pond-eyed and nervy as a horse. Flinching at his half-brother's feints. Hence Tetch, Tetchy, and the name had stuck to him like a bindi-eye. Even now, grown wiry and stoic and lantern-jawed. Jackal-jawed, says her sister, Estelle, who doesn't trust him. Who's sure that whatever is rotten in Jack must likewise be rotten in his brother, just more cunningly hidden.

They're not the same people, Stell.

Who ever said they were? I worry though. You let him around those girls …

Oh please.

Well you never … Don't go telling me he's sound, though, love. Don't tell me there aren't a few loose wires up there.

And Evelyn does have to wonder, sometimes: are they some kind of unaccomplishable task? Herself and Jack and the girls. Not so much more than a giant clock or radio, a machine so big and broken he might spend his whole life tinkering away at it and never get to the part where he has to name a price. Why else?

She hoists the final box of decorations onto a newly cleared shelf, pushing it back flush against the wall, as far from sight as possible. Till next Christmas, and whatever that might drag with it.

Around her the useless clutter of the last several years. Somehow never enough money, but still too much stuff. Too much of the wrong stuff. The blue Jantzen swimsuit, she wishes she'd held on to that. Not to actually wear—snowball's chance she'd get into it now anyway; that body is long gone—but because it stood for something. For a
when
. What to call it, the
when
, her life before Jack?
Before I met your father
. The Coastal Years. Or she might call them The Pre-War Years.
When you could put your hands like this
. Of course the war had been going on, somewhere (well, she knew
where
) the entire time she'd been lapping the ocean baths, stringing those lazy summers end-to-end, seaglass beads clacking onto an invisible length of fishing line. And some of the boys from that time, friends' boyfriends and older brothers, had been wrenched away to fight in it. There were debates in the papers, when she cared to look, speeches on TV and radio. The protests, the marches down Broadway, the moratoriums would all come later. But in any case it had sweet little to do with her, the notion of it as far away as the land it was being fought on.

It was still going on when she met Jack, but his time in it was done. You could believe that, looking at him then. He'd laugh at any old thing. At the smallest, stupidest … And his hair brilled up like Marlon Brando, spilling over the right side of his forehead in dark glossy waves, with the skew of his grin doing its best to balance that out, always lifting up higher at the left. At any old thing. That was how she first noticed him, noticing her. Just standing there at the foot of the narrow stairway leading up to the projectionist's booth, gripping the bulky hexagonal canisters that housed the film she and Stell were waiting in line to see. What was it, even, that film? January in Melbourne, and the two of them were on loan to their aunt and uncle. Three whole weeks—what was there to do after walking a million laps of the Tan and trying to be polite about the oily jellyfish bath that was Port Phillip Bay? It was as hot as chip fat, and no nice place to swim, unless you took a car. The girls saw films. Anything and everything showing. That particular day it might have been that stupid vampire blockbuster Stella had been tugging her sleeve about. And when they'd gone to the candy bar for a couple of Cokes, there was the projectionist again, his smile skewiff, Bring us back a Cherry Ripe, love?

And why the hell not, she'd thought, just to see what it was like up there (airless, acrid, panic-causing; how could he have stood it? she'd later wonder, knowing what she came to know). But if she was honest—telling Stell to go on in and save her a seat, twirling the red-foiled chocolate bar like a baton—it was to see that slow curl of his smile.

Oh come on, get off it, Stell said later. It wasn't a smile, you dolt, it was a bloody
leer.

But for those first few years. When he could still stand things, or at least pretend to. When he could still stand to be around people. Before all the shrapnel had worked its way to the surface.
I wanna see you in uniform
. And she had wanted to. She'd been idiot enough to want that. Now here were these things she wishes she could unsee. Unlearn. Unlive. That
make-you-stronger
guff was just that.

The last of The Coastal Years belonged to a burnt-orange halter bikini—part payment for a small-change fashion shoot she'd done at twenty, modelling a now-extinct line of beachwear while smoking a now-extinct brand of cigarette. Everything was burnt-orange in those days. The '70s could really only be remembered in those saturated tangerines and iridescent blues. Even dreams played out in Kodachrome. Kids could be forgiven for believing the world truly looked like that then.

She'd been wearing the burnt-orange on that last morning at the baths, when Jack came to scoop her out of the water; This is it, Kiddo
.
And an hour later, her hair was dried to pale stiff waves, to salty blonde meringue, as she packed the car with whatever would fit into it, her father standing tall and stock still on the verandah.

Is this how you're thanking us? He was booming up there, at first, but he quickly fell soft when he saw there would be no stopping her. We didn't buy you that car so you could drive it away on us, love. Your mother and I …

But her mother was inside, refusing to play a part in the drama. Refusing to look or to speak whenever Ev went in for another armload of dresses. This was the same tactic she'd employed with Ev and Stell when they were tantrumming children. Eyes on the road. Let them exhaust themselves of their nonsense. Now she just stood there in the kitchen, rinsing and re-rinsing the dishcloth, wringing it out tight, wiping down the draining board. Stell had already left for school, and so missed the opportunity to be corrupted by the scene. She was sore about it for a good few years, Evelyn sneaking off that way.