The Eye of the Sheep (16 page)

Uncle Rodney said, ‘My turn, mate,’ and he hugged me, and if there was any fast left it was lost in Uncle Rodney’s chest.

I went to Ned and put my arms around his neck. He stayed still as I held him, his centre holding us together.

‘We’ve got to go, son. Don’t want to miss our plane.’

‘Yes, Dad, yes. Our plane.’ I pulled away from Ned. Our time was over. Now there would be another time. What were the instructions for crying?

We put our bag into the tunnel and watched as it went behind the curtain, and waited for it to come out again.

‘What happened to it in there, Dad?’ I asked when the bag came out the other side.

‘Not a lot, son. You didn’t miss out on much.’ He smiled.

I smiled too. ‘I hope you’re right, Dad, I hope you’re right.’

Without waiting or stopping to check the temperature – the same quick way he entered the sea – Dad took my hand as we crossed the tar towards the steps that led up to the aeroplane.

As soon as we were in our seats we both leaned back and closed our eyes. The side of Dad’s hard brown hand lay against mine, and we rested there, information travelling between us without obstruction: the changing shape of the sea, Uncle Rodney’s voice, Ned, sun, sausages, green ball, pink lemonade, the Statesman’s button, blue and white striped shorts. The messages, big and small, moved back and forth through the skins of our touching hands. We didn’t wake until the lady said, ‘Preparing for descent.’ Dad blinked and swallowed and our hands pulled apart as we prepared for descent.

Mum was waiting for us just outside the airport, her dress blown back against her legs by the wind. She grabbed at it to hold it down. There was a scarf covered in berries around her neck that I had never seen before; strawberries and raspberries and blueberries and mulberries and all the other berries in
the world there in Mum’s scarf, her neck pink and sweet, and lipstick red on her mouth.

‘Mum!’ I shouted, running to her.

She put her arms around me and held me tight.

‘Jimmy, my boy!’ she said as if they were the words of her favourite song.

‘Uncle Rodney’s got a Statesman, Mum,’ I said as we climbed into the Holden. ‘The windows come down when you press a button.’

‘Boy, did he enjoy pressing that button,’ said Dad.

Mum and Dad’s laughter was a harmony made of two tunes. One held up the other, lifted it, bounced it and caught it again. They took turns.

I rested against the back seat and a long breath of air that had come all the way from Broken Island was released into the body of the Holden.

That night I lay in the sewing room in my bed, eyes half closed, listening to the brothers’ lullaby in my ears.
Smack click shit smack click shit two on the black two on the black shot mate shot
. I was drifting on the seas of Broken Island when Mum came into the room.

‘It was good, wasn’t it, Jimmy? Your holiday?’ she said softly, sitting on the edge of my bed. I couldn’t stop my weight tipping towards her. Beneath her words, I heard her wheezing breath, trying to push through its message.

‘It went well, Mum, it went well.’

She smoothed her hand across my back. I rolled away. I wanted to trace the thread that joined shadow to shadow. Why hadn’t I seen it in the house before, linking chair to cupboard to carpet to train? I wanted to watch it disappear, feel myself
grow fractionally faster, my cells begin to spin, then just when I thought it was gone forever, see it appear again, making me as slow and sleepy as Ned lying on the hot sand.

‘Goodnight, Mum,’ I said.

There was a small gap of quiet. Mum sat in it, wondering, until she got to the other side.

‘I love you, Jimmy,’ she said. Then she left the room.

On Monday Dad put his green and glowing vest over his shirt and kissed Mum on the mouth. The pressing of their lips caused a chemical reaction that lifted the curtains. When Dad stepped back and looked at her I saw a thousand tiny lines that ran from his body to hers.

Even though my holiday with Dad was over it was still holidays from school, so I stayed home with Mum and drove her up the wall. We piled cheese on tomato on meat on milk on pasta sheets on meat on cheese, on and on and up and up and up went the layers.

‘Your father loves lasagne,’ Mum said as she greased the tray. She was pink and stained with the berries as she said it.
Your father loves lasagne.

When Dad came home that night he didn’t go to the sitting room and drink beers. He sat at the kitchen table while Mum got the lasagne ready and he spoke about a man called Marv who was too old to work but couldn’t afford to stop. He talked about Marv’s wife Julie and how she put him under pressure, though he could understand why, and how Marv didn’t want
to retire anyway. He said Marv used to be a fighter but he’d given up.

Mum nodded and said, ‘Hmmm,’ and, ‘Oh,’ and, ‘Really?’

Dad kept talking. He liked Marv and he didn’t like Marv, he was angry with Marv and Marv made him sad. He understood Julie and he didn’t. He talked about pay and hours and break rates and output. At last Dad’s valves were unblocked and the words flowed as easily as oil through the pipes.

As we ate the lasagne and drank our juice I looked at my Dad in the fading yellow of our kitchen and I saw how brown and bright he was. In the place of the red in his eyes were waves rolling over and foam bubbling up white and shining.

‘It was good to see Rod again,’ Dad said, putting lasagne on his fork.

‘How is he without Shirl? Is he doing okay?’ Mum asked.

‘Better off. Shirl was always on his back about something or other. He’s a free man now.’ Dad took a long sip of his juice.

‘A free man! Is that what you’d like to be?’

‘Only love sets you truly free,’ said my dad, putting his hand over my mother’s.

‘You know all the right things to say, don’t you, love?’

‘Old silver-tongue.’ Dad turned to me. ‘Did I ever tell you when I first met your mother?’ he asked.

‘Mum’s told me,’ I answered. ‘Point Paradise.’

Mum smiled. ‘You’ve got a good memory, Jim.’

‘There she was,’ said Dad, looking back at Mum. ‘Sitting outside her little caravan reading a book. The wind was blowing her hair and lifting the pages. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The only time she moved was to turn the page.’

Mum looked at Dad. ‘I was on a reading holiday. All I brought
were books. Two weeks away from work with nothing to do but read.’

‘And I was on a fishing holiday. All I brought was bait.’

‘You smelled like fish.’

‘You didn’t mind.’

‘I didn’t mind a bit.’

‘Point Paradise.’ Dad shook his head. ‘The most beautiful place on earth. When I die that’s where I want to be buried.’

Mum looked at him and rolled her eyes. ‘That’s a long way off, love, if I’ve got any say in it.’

‘A long way off!’ I repeated. ‘A long way off, Dad!’

Later, when Merle Haggard sang ‘Holding Things Together’, Dad took Mum in his arms and spun her around the kitchen. A chair fell as they twirled and Mum shrieked but Dad didn’t stop to let her pick up the chair. Though he was small he could still get around her, as if his arms went on after they were finished. They wrapped her up tight as they danced so that every part of her was held, the parts I had never seen before and the parts I had. She was held so strong and so tight by my dad she could never come apart. I smacked my hands together and every finger had a partner to hit and the sound that came out was in time to Mum and Dad’s feet as they danced over the lino squares –
black white black white black white
holding things together.

Three weeks after the holiday Dad came home and said some blokes were going to be laid off because of low productivity. He said, ‘They could’ve given us bloody notice. I’ve been there
for years.’ When he spoke I heard all the days of rust caught in his vocals.

Mum crossed the kitchen towards him. ‘But it won’t be you, love. Maybe some of the men who are near retirement. Some of the older boys, but not you.’

‘No one is safe. Not me, not any of us.’ Dad moved away, opening the fridge door and pulling out a beer. He cracked the top and tipped it over his open mouth. If Dad was made of glass you would have seen the beer rushing through his network; beer through the tunnels of his legs, to his toes, along his arms, all the way to his fingertips, around his heart valves, into his breathing tubes and alveoli, up his neck and into his head until every part of him was flooded. What happened at the refinery that day would be drowned.

‘Oh, love,’ said Mum. She went to him, her face sorry, as if it was she who was going to lay him off, she who would tell him he wasn’t wanted and had no place.

Dad walked out of the kitchen and into the sitting room. He turned on
M
^*
A
^*
S
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H
. From against the door I heard Klinger say, ‘You could let me try that nail polish,’ but Dad didn’t even laugh.

When Dad went to work the next morning he didn’t kiss Mum and he didn’t look at me and say,
Pass the juice, Bruce
, or,
Milk for your tea, squire?
He drank his coffee standing at the island. When Mum handed him his thermos he didn’t say,
Thanks, love
. He just took it.

‘It won’t be you, love. You’ll be fine,’ Mum said as he opened the front door.

‘I’m not worried about it,’ Dad snapped back, as if there was one wrong thing to say in this world and Mum had just said it.

After Dad left it was as if everything in the kitchen had been thrown into the air and settled back down in the wrong places. It was unbalanced. There was only one person who could bring back the balance and that was Dad.

We went to the shops, we swept the floors, we went to Mum’s work for the lunch shift, we sat in the sun and ate Lemon Softies and Mum drank tea but what we were really doing was waiting for Dad to come home, to see how he would be, what he would do.

I wished Robby was here. When I was on the holiday just with Dad I didn’t miss Robby as much. He was there, but it didn’t hurt. But now, without him, there weren’t enough people to absorb the static; the rooms filled with it, buzzing and vibrating. I missed Robby so much my chest ached. When it was almost six o’clock Mum began to look at her watch. She looked at it many times. She checked her face in the mirror, she put on lipstick, she moved quickly across the kitchen in the same pathways over and over, then back to look at her face in the mirror, as if she wasn’t sure about what she saw the first time.

I was sitting at the kitchen table setting up bridges to later smash when Dad came through the door. I could tell he was carrying the air from the refinery and it needed time to dispel. Mum went to him too quickly; ‘Oh, love,’ she said. ‘How was it?’ Her lipstick had a scent that reached his nostrils when she spoke and mixed with the vapours of the refinery still trapped in his head, and made him dizzy. I wanted to warn her,
Stand back, Mum
.
Don’t speak
. But it was too late.

I followed the line around the kitchen, seeing it connect my dad’s ears to his head that led to his hair which led to the fluorescent bar of light via the cord that hung down from the blind. Then into the quiet pocket of our waiting, I spoke. ‘Are The Good Times Really Over?’ Merle Haggard’s song leapt
from between my teeth without warning. Dad looked at me in the land between anger and laughter. A land like a horizon; if you put a foot too heavily on either side it tipped. There was a gap, then he laughed. Mum did too.

Dad took a beer from the fridge, smiling as he swigged. ‘Are the good times really over?’ he asked the bottle.

Dad didn’t talk about Marv or Julie at dinner. Mum made shepherd’s pie. When she cut through the potato roof, all the things the shepherd loved – carrots, potatoes, peas – rolled out onto the plate, steaming and soft, floating in brown sauce. When she brought the dinner to the table Dad didn’t say,
Smells good, sweetheart,
or,
You know the way to a man’s heart, Paula
. He sat without speaking, sticking forkfuls of the pie into his mouth and sipping from his beer. It was as if Mum and me weren’t there.

That night I was lying in bed when I heard the muffled voices of Mum and Dad. I got out of bed, crossed the hall and stood just outside their door. ‘They say half of us are going to go,’ I heard Dad say.

‘But you won’t be in that half, love.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘You’ve got to have a bit of faith, Gav.’

‘That’s bullshit, Paula. I’m facing things.’

‘Well, okay, if the worst does happen, we’ll be right.’

‘Living on what you bring in?’

There was a pause. The cells in my system began to spin. I felt tiny pins pricking the skin down my arms.

‘When will you find out?’

‘They’ll start firing the end of next week.’

‘It will be okay, Gav. We’ll deal with it when we get there.’ There was a small space and then she asked, ‘Things have been good lately, haven’t they?’

Dad didn’t answer her. He didn’t say anything. It was a gap that nobody reached the other side of. There was the rustle of clothes, the flick of the light switch, the pull of blankets. Then nothing. Mum and Dad lay suspended over the gap.

The tiny prickings in my skin reached my back and shoulders.

I went back to my room and got in bed. I took a breath and waited for a sheep. The house was different without even the
chance
of Robby. I closed my eyes and made a picture of him out at sea with his team. Where was his boat? I wanted to send a message to him along the line that travelled between waves.
Half
, I would say.
Half
, Robby,
half!
The message would rise and fall along the line with the waves beneath it until it reached his boat. One of the team would see its small red light flashing on the dark sea and the message would be pulled up on a rope and delivered to my brother in the cockpit, and he would hear it and come home.

Dad drank beer every night of that week. On Friday I crawled through the fence into the wetlands. I sat on the
Lady Free
, the grass now so high around her sides you could hardly see her. I closed my eyes and threw out my line and hoped that it might touch Robby’s underwater. When I opened my eyes I looked across to the refinery. For the first time there was no flame from the pipe. It had gone out. Productivity was too low to supply it. With no flame would there still be refining and rust for my dad?