Loving, Faithful Animal (8 page)

Can we not and say we did?

Jesus, I'll do it
. Reed holding up—what was it that time? A chook. A frag. A tin of rice. Don't remember.

When you think of happiness, what picture do you have in your mind?

You already asked that one.

But you declined to answer.

Ev backed up against the door. Lani nine years old and getting in between. Already, that look in her eyes, her hands making sharp little fists.
Hate you, hate you
. Thought:
Yeah me too, love, me too.

Brighton Beach like a carnival. Fried sugar and vinegar smells floating from food vans down to the shore, thickening the salt air. Little kids belting around barefoot, spraying up the powdery sand, belonging to no-one, it seems. Huddle of Scots or fake-Scots all arms-thrown-round-shoulders and
Auld Lang Syne
, but it's just past ten
—
still a couple of hours to go yet. Past this.

Payphone outside the yacht club. Could call her. Say,
Happy New Year's, baby
. Then what?

Waiting for the city to explode. Counting down, so it can't creep up. Gatling guns and red mines. Like the rain drumming the car roof, all those things that are lost forever, all those things that can't ever be good again. Watching the sky turn dusty yellow, trapping the light and spreading it out above the beach like an old blanket. Smothering.

Out here years ago, when both the girls were tiny. A day where nobody could've told just by looking. Where anybody would've looked and thought: Family. Sandwiches still cool in their foil, red fizz and icy beer. Hot chips, Ev licking salty oil from her fingers. Wading out past the breakers with Ruby and Lani, one hanging off each arm. Showing them how to somersault, out there where the water was over their heads.
Gimme your foot then
, and them clambering up to be launched skyward,
hup-hup-hup!

Ev walking out along the breakwall, pale cotton skirt whipping round her legs, shading the sun from her eyes with a forearm
. Mum! Come in.
But she's smiling and shaking her head because no, she's turning gold. Turning twenty. As if there has never been one bad year. That close. That life other people are living, right there within shouting distance. Then cupping her hands around her mouth and calling out across the water,
Alright, you three …

Calls us in. Us. Calls us home.

IV. Flight Mode

fake snow caught in
her hair, like festive dandruff. Lani ruffles it out.
Tender Prey
on the portable stereo, skipping on a scratch. Half out of her clothes, these red licks all down her legs from doubling up on Will's Honda, in a skirt too short to shield her from the whipping scrub. Now it looks like she's been belted a few rounds with the iron cord. But that was years ago, the iron cord. Lately it's fists if it's anything, if her mother can gather the energy, though most of the fight has gone out of her these past few weeks. Something's up; now she's sleeping later, flipping out less. No more screaming through Lani's locked bedroom door. No more being dragged out of bed by a handful of her hair at four a.m., because the dishes haven't been done or the rubbish hasn't been wheeled to the roadside. If Evelyn's got a problem, she takes it to the rabbits, out of earshot. Muttering like a madwoman while the pink-eyed bunnies blink back at her from their pokey hutch. Lani could just about hug them.

She wets a finger in her mouth and traces one of the angry welts across her shin. Wonders if every moment she moves through will mark her somehow. This time, at least, she's glad to have proof. It felt good, safe, pressed up against him, fingertips laddering his ribs through his T-shirt. The night rushing at them so fast her eyes teared up. She'd wanted him to keep riding, all night, right up to the border. Sleep by the river. Any river. Any place that wasn't home. But he'd turned off the highway and onto her road, past the few neighbouring houses with their spooky, lonely television glow seeping through closed blinds. Will pulled over just short of the house, and she climbed off, didn't argue. He must have sensed her disappointment, though, and misread it.

I'd take you closer, you know, but your dad. He'd probably lob a grenade at me.

I told you, she said, unthreading the helmet strap from where it bit into her chin. He's gone.

Yeah, but he's gotta come back sometime.

She'd shrugged and handed him back his helmet. Anyway, he's not the one to worry about, believe me. Thanks for the ride. And she'd walked towards the house, holding her breath in the flood of quiet that came before the kick of the engine.

He'd reappeared towards the end of November, just materialised in place of his father in the mechanics shed. She'd missed the bus and was scuffing the forty minutes home in her clompy Oxfords, and there he was, re-chroming parts of Mack Ferguson's pristine Velocette that not one soul had ever seen the man ride.

Lani remembered Will at fourteen; he'd had a sort of helpless, unfinished look back then, downy buzzcut and wet, marsupial eyes. When his folks split his mother whisked him off to live in Auckland. Lani had imagined spearfishing (true), and snowboarding (also true), had flared up with envy for an instant and just as quickly forgotten about it. About him. Now in his dad's workshop he was kneeling over a bucket, wearing a face mask and thick rubber gloves, like for dishes or strangulation. Hair brushing the collar of a T-shirt that might have been black once, now greyed with wear, a Rorschach of sweat showing between his shoulderblades. Will turned around then, had maybe felt her gawking, and she saw the glint of a barbell through his brow. That wouldn't fly here, wouldn't last long. She was two years younger and she could've told him that much. It seemed a stupid thing to say though, a bad way to start. She couldn't think up anything better, but he saved her from having to. Raised his gloved hand and squinted under it, then swiped his dust mask away against his shoulder.

Hey, he said. Lana Burroughs.

Lani.

Right. You shot up. He left the headlight casing submerged in its chemical bath, and came out into the daylight, unpeeling his gloves.

He gave her a look she couldn't read, then came out with it: Is it true what people've been saying?

She felt a little stab in her stomach about what he might have meant. Was it true she'd had an abortion? No, just glandular fever. That her uncle was an ex-con? That was only talk, though sometimes she wished it were true. Then Tetch would be weird-interesting instead of just weird-weird. Was Matt D true, was Jarrod Blackwood true, was Marshall Weste true? Yes, yes, and almost. Not quite, with Weste; he hadn't been able to finish, and so they'd sat there quiet for a while passing a smoke back and forth between them, until Weste punched the bricks like an idiot and skinned his knuckles. Later he'd tried to get his whole hand in, as if to settle things that way. But whose business was any of it?

What? she asked. She untucked her school shirt, hot now and almost bored.

What happened with your dog and all that.

For a moment she felt relieved, and then ashamed for feeling relieved. Yeah, she told him, it was revolting.

Sorry, he said. Think I kinda remember that dog. Dad says he's heard of lambs ripped up pretty bad.

She couldn't tell if he was taking the piss. Where were there sheep around here? He'd been gone four years. She looked for the fourteen-year-old in him—the scrawny BMX rat with the rusty crust around his nostrils from constant nosebleeds. But that kid was gone, or pretty well disguised under work-stained Levis and the faded tour shirt of some Kiwi punk band. He wasn't joking, she decided, just confused maybe.

Reckon the government will get onto it one day, he was saying. Wait and see—sooner or later some ag minister will be throwing their weight at it, tuning in to all the crackpots like it was the last thylacine.

She blew air through her teeth and let that go for an answer. Nobody spoke much of politicians in her house, of what they might do. Only what might be done to them: grisly stuff.

So you're just back for a visit, she guessed, and Will shrugged, glancing back at the dismantled bike.

School's done. Dad's sick. Made sense. Then he told her he'd meant to travel, after finishing school, backpack South America. But there wasn't the cash for it, anyway, and his old man had to get to dialysis twice a week.

But Argentina, Colombia. Not like they're going to dry up and blow away, hey? He was looking at her legs: long, bruised, brown enough. Her school socks had slid halfway down her shins on the walk, exposing the still-pink flick of a scar where an ignition key had crushed into her knee over winter. Swinging the wheel on Matt's old man's ruined Datsun, her eyes closed, driving just to crash.

The uniforms they make you gooses wear … Where I went we just wore whatever. Anything we liked. You could dye your hair blue if you wanted and nobody would give you a second look.

She didn't point out that he'd once had to wear the same uniform. But she did tell him then, about the barbell.

He'd only grinned at her. We'll see, hey?

*

She doesn't want to risk the bathroom, a collision with Evelyn in the hallway—she'll just get roped into doing some other thing—so settles for dry-shaving her legs in the privacy of her room. One of her father's disposable plastic razors, a cheapo that'll take skin with it here and there if she's not careful. She rinses her shins with squirts from a water bottle, brushes the last of the fake snow from her hair. Tonight there'll be a bonfire, a lot of booze, a dozen ways of leaving without leaving. Trina with some sweet-awful rocket fuel to rinse out the bitter grit.

The dress is a knee-
length
lurex halter, split to show thigh. Wet-looking, backless. No bra, then. Not like there's much to hold up anyway. She'd seen Trina wearing it once, the dress, and what it did to her. Who it made her into. It had taken a flask of snaffled bourbon and an English essay to wrangle it for tonight. Worth it, Lani figures, watching herself in the narrow mirror on the back of the door, writhing a bit, like dancing without trying too hard. Glitter gumming her eyelashes together, purple mascara streaking her hair. There was an idea of what she was supposed to look like. This isn't it, really, but it's as close as she's getting. (Aunt Stell at Christmas, saying, You look so much like your mum at your age, but so much … I don't know. Older? You always look so tired, honey.

Yeah, well. My mother didn't have my mother as a mother. She'd said something like that.)

She packs a bag with a pair of skinny pink heels, makeup patiently filched from the chemist, lipstick so dark it's nearly black. A green plastic pillbox filled with her father's meds, all of them jumbled in together. Sampler.

Rolled into a pair of socks rolled into a drawer, the bundle of autumn-coloured bank notes. Always in dreams she's kicking up money amongst crinkling leaves and chip-packets rustling in the gutters. Of course it never happens that way. Some of the bundle is from spruiking the meds, but most of it comes from the grandfolks, care of Stell. Ghostfolks, Lani calls them; she wouldn't know them if she met them in the street.
On the hush, now …
Enough there for a bus ticket to Sydney and a week of floating up there, if she wants, though that's not what they'd meant it for. Or maybe they had, who really knew.

Outside, the squeal and shudder of the garage roller door going up. Evelyn hauling Christmas junk out there.
Conclusively
, she'd repeated this morning. Tests to prove
conclusively
. That Lani was not her father's child. But Lani had been overhearing this story since before she'd known what conclusively even meant, and the shock of it, the hurt of it, had more or less been worn away. Anyway it turned out she was. Anyway what it really means, this story her mother tells over and over, is:
Be on my side. Get in my corner.

She spins the volume up on
Sugar Sugar Sugar
and escapes through the slit window mesh.

*

She reaches the Ark early, dropping into the narrow slice of shade it throws.
Ark
is only a name people give it; really it's the ferrocement hull of a ship, propped up in the middle of someone's fallow paddock, way back from the road. It makes no sense out here, hours and hours from any water deep enough for it to belong in. And at the same time it makes a kind of sense, a kind of dream logic, having been here longer than herself or any of her family, its iron struts bubbled with vibrant rust, sunk down into the baked earth. Whether it's an abandoned project, or somebody's idea of a joke, it's everyone's now. The town's unofficial guestbook, all graffed over with tags and postcodes and who was here in '74, '78,
'
83, etc., and who sux cox and what their phone numbers are or used to be. And above it all, in big orange house-paint letters:
The End Shall Come With A Flood
. Sometimes there are cows nosing about under the Ark, bubblegum tongues stretching out for the wedge of grass that stays green in its shadow. It does look kind of biblical then.

Lani swaps her boots for heels and stashes her bag in the shade, both her and the Ark looking out of place, waiting together for something to happen. Something to lift them up and carry them elsewhere. Just this feeling, this inkling. Like maybe there are places in the world that don't intend to press you flat, grind you out between the sky and the earth. The world is getting smaller; even she can see that much, even from out here. Or the spaces between people are getting smaller, the distances. Shrinking.

She listens for Will's Honda, but there's no engine noise at all. Just the rushing sound of the grass and its cicadas, all of it oceanlike. She keeps time, making a maraca of her father's pills in their green plastic box. She can't remember the proper names for all of them—the two-coloured capsule ones, and the round vanilla-yellow ones with the cross etched into the top. The tiny blue pills with hard glossy shells like baby M&M's, but the insides are dusty white and bitter. These her mother crushes up with spoonfuls of honey when Ru can't sleep.

Mum, you can't give that stuff to kids.

Excuse me, madam, you're the expert now, are you?

Ru standing in the doorway, swamped in an oversized T-shirt nightie, hair a rat's nest. Glaring like,
Who asked you?

Fine.

The pills all do different versions of the same thing: tranqs. Tranquillise. As though their dad's a dangerous animal escaped from somewhere. When he takes them, half his lights go out—
bang!
—and he just wants to sit in his chair and watch reruns of old Paul Newman movies.

They muck up me thinking, he complains of the pills. But every single time Mum asks him what he's thinking about, meds or no meds, he just blinks at her like a buffalo and says, Nothin'.

In the years before Ru—or the years before Ru can probably remember—there were sometimes coin tricks. A copper one-cent piece rubbed and rubbed against Dad's elbow while he told a story about the shy possum, and when the story was over both possum and coin had disappeared.
Kerpoof
. She remembers, too, animal faces drawn in blue biro onto the shells of hard-boiled eggs—the childish curling Ws of cat mouths, and the sharp Vs of bird beaks—so that when she opened the fridge to sneak a mouthful of condensed milk, cold from the can, there'd be a miniature zoo lined up inside the door, staring back at her accusingly. A little egg-animal jury.

In those days he'd found kinder ways of getting away. Fossicking trips to the salvage yard with Uncle Tetch for electrical bits and pieces, or mushroom-hunting through the pine plantation and along the nearby windbreaks. A couple of times he'd thought to take Lani, the two of them rugged up against the autumn chill, sifting under the dripping trees for the alien forms that nudged up overnight from the damp carpet of needles.
Slippery Jacks
. She thought he was fibbing about the name, whose suspect caps were sickening to look at and worse to touch, sometimes with millipedes or other crawlies caught in their goo; who would eat those?