Solo (5 page)
I ran out into the back yard in my T-shirt and undies with a beanie on my head so I wouldn’t get sconed. I picked up the hailstones from where they landed on the grass and collected them in the wheelbarrow. I popped one ball of ice into my mouth, even though Dad always said I wasn’t supposed to eat them. I bit down and it crumbled between my teeth like the shaved ice you get in a snow cone, except it tasted sharp and metallic.
After the hail stopped and all the ice balls were melting into each other, I went back inside. The newspaper was folded on the armchair and the glasses rested on it with their arms open, but my dad was gone.
The next day I had hundreds of tiny bruises on my shoulders and on the back of my legs. The doctor thought it was hives from the shock about my dad’s disappearance, and I didn’t tell her any differently, because by then I was actually in shock and I’d forgotten all about the hail.
I just sat there on the examination bed. The ones with the white sheet. You can tell it’s plastic underneath because the sheet slips all the time. I sat there and wondered why they didn’t use a bigger sheet so they could tuck it in, but then I thought they probably changed it every time someone new sits up there because of germs and it must cost them a lot in laundry detergent. Laundry detergent is expensive.
That’s what I closed with. Stories sound truer if they have lots of details in them.
Becca wanted to know where my dad was now and I told her I didn’t know. Maybe he was a spy? He could have been captured and tortured. She wanted to know if he was in Guantanamo Bay.
Becca Holdenstodd told everyone that my dad was a missing person, and the next lunchtime I had to tell the stormy-night spy story to a larger crowd. I told it so well I even cried.
Lorelei Darton told the teacher who was on playground duty that I was telling lies and he made us play soccer instead. Mr Lewis didn’t like my stories, or tackle footy either.
The next day Becca wouldn’t talk to me. Neither would Lorelei, or any of the other kids. I tried to play soccer with them, but nobody passed me the ball.
After that I stood on the wooden seat near the stinkbug tree and sang songs to myself. I tried to lilt like Billie Holiday. If it rained I went to the library and read
Mad
magazines.
At the next school I stuck to the away-on-business story and I never invited anyone home.
I hate waking up and not knowing where I am. This place smells like a vet clinic. There’s a sound – a persistent beep, like a barcode scanner in a supermarket. I open my eyes and the ceiling is made of squares, bordered by narrow metal strips. The squares look thin, as though you could lift them out with one hand.
The bed I’m lying on is narrow and there is a plastic sheet under me that crinkles when I move. Then I remember. I had been curled up in a chair in the ward’s waiting room until there was a spare bed available. A woman was discharged and so a nurse put me in this bed.
Opposite me is an old woman. She is glaring at me. Her cheeks are hollow. The beeping sound is the machine attached to her. She has plastic tubes up her arms and in her face. Her eyes are sunken and there are nasty purple marks blossoming under her skin – skin that is draped over her bones like unironed linen.
Her shock of hair is the same colour as the pillows. She is so thin that if you couldn’t see her withered face and stringy, mulberry-stained arms you’d think she was a pile of rumpled sheets.
To avoid her gaze I watch the mini TV hanging in the corner near the ceiling. There’s a game show on and somebody is winning a tropical holiday plus a home gymnasium package.
I slide out of the bed and tiptoe into the hallway. I find Itsy. She’s sitting with her friend – the one she pretends to me that she doesn’t see because I don’t like him. He’s all limbs and he scuttles like a spider.
We studied spiders in science class. They poison their prey. They wait until their quarry is helpless, and then they spit on them. Their spit melts the body and then they suck up the juice. That’s what Mum’s friend is like. He has all those long limbs and he’s waiting.
Itsy is telling the nurses a story. She says it was an accident – a splinter that got infected. She’s told the real-estate agent a hundred times that verandah’s dangerous, but they never do anything, do they? It was a splinter and she took it out – most of it, she thought, but it couldn’t have been, because it went septic. She’d thought it would get better.
The nurses don’t say anything at all, but I can tell they know she’s lying because we’ve been through this before. They know what she does. They say they are using the maximum dose of painkillers.
Itsy uses swear words in front of the other patients and I’m embarrassed. She says she’s going outside with her friend. The nurses exchange a glance. Itsy and her friend walk down the hallway. I was hoping that she would come to check on me first.
As soon as she is around the corner they start to talk about her. Even the patients say what they think, and I don’t want to hear because Itsy is my mum and I love her.
I slip down the hall and climb back into my narrow bed. The old lady and I stare at each other. A nurse comes to tell me Itsy will be five minutes, but she takes much longer than that. The nurse sits on the edge of my bed and strokes my hair. I close my eyes, but I’m not really asleep. When she gets up I see that she is crying for me.
My dad’s a semi-professional golfer. He doesn’t play in the major competitions – just the minor ones. Mostly he goes around to different clubs giving lessons to really rich people. Sometimes he’s gone for weeks at a time on tours. When he’s away he eats at restaurants every single night. At home I have a whole bunch of soaps and hand lotions from all the hotels he stays at.
One time there was a guy who owned this big company – they make tints for paint, or something like that. He asked my dad to go on an overseas holiday just to give him lessons, every day, at a tropical resort. I think it was in Vanuatu. It could have been Fiji. It was for three whole weeks, and Dad only had to give a lesson for two hours a day.
We were going to go as well, but at the last minute I got the mumps.
Once I told people that Dad was in hospital with cancer. All the people I told felt sorry for me, but it wasn’t like any kind of pity I’d met before. I liked it.
I couldn’t bring myself to think it in the front part of my mind, but I was wishing that he did have cancer. If he’d had cancer, I wouldn’t hate him for leaving.
There was another advantage to the cancer story, which was that I could genuinely say that I didn’t want to talk about it, and they would back off. It was a different sort of back-off too, as though they were backing away from a basket of sleeping kittens, rather than a huntsman that suddenly appears from behind a picture frame.
I wanted to stick with the cancer story, but I had to consider the possibility that he would come back. I suppose he will, eventually. He will want us to pretend that nothing has happened. Or worse still, he’ll want to talk. He’ll tell me it wasn’t my fault really, and if he needs to say it, then it means he has considered that it might be.
My fault.
I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to know that he has thought about it.
He’ll want us to move to the country so he can grow wine grapes and be a yoga instructor. He might even have found God.
At least we aren’t in the same house. In the old place he would have strutted around picking up things and moving them, like an old dog pissing on posts.
He will have to familiarise himself with a new place – like a guest.
Will he look like a cancer patient? I imagine him pale, drained, sapped, shell-like. He will be smaller. Reduced. Diminished.
The chemist’s shop is bright with fluorescent lights hanging on chains over the tables, as if it was a pool hall. My dad is wearing his white smock with buttons at the shoulder. It’s dirty with dark grey handprints on the chest and at the hips, like newsprint.
There are tablets in ziplock bags and in vials on the counter – yellow ones and blue ones. It looks as if they have funny marks like faces on them. Maybe they’re lollies. I lean over to get a better look and Dad says, ‘Careful, Possum’.
I’m in my primary-school uniform – a pale blue tunic with a white Peter Pan collar. There’s a dried stain on the front from the melting chocolate iceblock I had at lunch, and normally that would be a problem because Itsy might not wash my tunic overnight, but today it doesn’t matter because tomorrow is sports day and I will wear my green pleated netball skirt and polo shirt, which I have already ironed and laid out ready.
I bounce over imaginary hopscotch squares down the middle of the shop to pass the time while Dad finishes.
There are customers on plastic seats waiting for their orders. An old man with sad eyes rubs at a terrible rash that scales up his chin and over his nose. There’s a young woman with a T-shirt that has ‘Kiss me before my boyfriend comes back’ written in silver sequins on the front. She’s jiggling a baby on her knee, and it makes a staccato gurgling sound, as though it’s riding in a car on a dirt road.
I’m hoping tonight we can have takeaway from the shop around the corner. We’ll have hot chips and fresh bread for sandwiches. Dad will order a hamburger with the works for himself and two dim sims for Mum.
The runner comes in. He takes a few packets off the counter. His job is to deliver the packets to the people at home who might be too weak or sick to come and get them themselves.
He throws an imaginary stone and then hops along my hopscotch squares. I accuse him of stepping on a line and he lunges forward to tickle me. I squeal, turn, and run straight into the old man, who grunts.
Dad reprimands me, but I am already embarrassed. I sit on one of the plastic chairs and swing my feet. I have new teeth coming through. I can feel the sharp edge with the tip of my tongue. I’m watching the runner boy. He winks at me, not because I got in trouble but because we both did. I grin and it’s the first time I have ever looked at him and felt that he is family to me.
Itsy will be mad at Dad for stopping at the chip shop on the way home because she’s been waiting for him to bring her medicine. She’ll shout at him and he’ll roll his eyes at me, at least that’s how it was supposed to happen, but we didn’t get to the fish-and-chip shop after all, because . . .
P
ART
T
HREE
Travelling into
flames
I had a dream about us
In the bottles and the bones of the night
‘
C
AN’T
R
UN
B
UT’
P
AUL
S
IMON
I don’t feel alone out here. I’m surrounded. I’m an alien in a new country, unfamiliar with the customs. An easy target.
During the day there are black flies that I’ve never seen before – sniper flies. They bite, and I don’t know until they’ve gone. An ant crawled up the leg of my pants and bit me in three places. I could feel the poison burning under my skin and I had to undress to get to it. I crushed it between my fingers, smelling the alkaline odour, and it waved its antennae smugly. The damage was done. I dabbed some toothpaste on my reddening welts.
At night there are mosquitoes that hover over me like news helicopters over a train crash. Graceless beetles attracted by the firelight hurl themselves at trees and each other. Possums hiss and snarl like alley cats, shaking the limbs of the trees. Crickets clamour like a chorus of spectators.
At dusk three green frogs hopped into my tent. I picked each of them up and their cold, clammy legs hammered against my fingers. Then when I turned off my torch I could see their silhouettes in the firelight as they clambered around on the fly-sheet catching the insects crashing into the sides of my tent with a sound like heavy rain.
There are tiny money spiders hanging from silk trapezes, and an orb spider that in the evening wove her web in the archway between the top of my tent and the guy ropes. When I went to collect wood I found a spider apartment block – a network of flossy web spreading metres in each direction and at least half a dozen arachnids scattered over the surface, limbs akimbo.
A finch bounced around the campsite. He found his reflection in the dented billycan and spent the next ten minutes challenging his little, dull, misshapen chum. Later a currawong settled on a branch and sang a melancholy cadence, but when I moved it flew away.
I was not prepared for the death. It’s everywhere. Fish jump out of the river to catch flies. A bird stole a dragonfly from a spiderweb and then took the protesting spider. I watched a lizard catch a grasshopper half its size. I could see the grasshopper’s legs thrash and then it was still. While the lizard stood in the open, struggling to swallow its enormous prey, a kookaburra swept down from a tree and snatched it.
Predator becomes prey. There is no justice, only stealth, speed and opportunity.
Scott arrived when I was about six. He was fifteen. He seemed a grown-up to me, tall and pale with a shock of red hair. He’d been in and out of foster care and juvenile detention homes for at least three years. No hippo-therapy for him.
Itsy didn’t like him, although she pretended she did in front of Dad. It was only little things. If she made a booking at a restaurant, she’d book for three so they had to re-lay the table on the spot. If he was watching television, she’d flick through the channels to see what else was on. She turned on the dishwasher when he was having a shower.
She didn’t have to do any of it. Scott and Dad were already awkward with each other – needing tools or sporting equipment to have something in common. Their pauses were a wretched search for something to say, whereas lulls in conversations between Dad and me were all about contentment.