It’s hard to watch. And hard to stop. Sometimes I just see them talking to each other. Might be about the day or about Tegwyn and me. I can watch all night when they do that.
This morning it was only Mum asleep with her bum up and her face down. A big white bum that got pink with the sun. A bum like an angry mob (still don’t get it). I came out of that bum. Gotta face facts.
Fat reckons it’s wrong. Checking on people, I mean. Mostly I reckon it’s the best way of making sure you know how your family is getting on. You get looked at all day and all night anyway. That eye of the sky sees you – why worry about your kids or your brother looking? It’s honest enough.
Funny, I keep thinking about people getting born and things getting born. Things die, too – I’m not stupid. Grammar will die before long because she’s lived a long time and has just about had enough. Chooks die. Forests die. I had a brother once. There are scars like train tracks on Mum’s belly. She was big with a baby when I was nine. Dad used to put his face on that big parcel and listen. When it came time to have the baby, she went into hospital in the city and came back a week later with nothing, only stitches and full eyes. I used to watch her squeezing milk from her tits into little bowls. I didn’t know what it was all about then. I can’t remember everything from that time, but I do remember Mum squeezing milk. And I do remember Dad on the bed when no one was around, crying, crying. I know how Fat feels. It’s scary when your Dad cries.
Here I am, half asleep in Mr Cherry’s truck with houses and shops going past. Traffic lights, billboards, people out on their front lawns with hoses, cars, cars, cars . . . it’s the city alright. And none of us is saying a word.
Here I am mumbling in my head. Here I am on the way to see my Dad asleep in hospital.
I’m glad I live just out of the city. Mum and Dad moved out before Tegwyn and me were born. Dad said he wanted to live near trees. Mum said she wanted to live near Dad. I reckon it’s made them happy. The trees all being chopped down made them mad, but even dying trees are trees. I don’t know everything about us Flacks. Only what I hear and what people tell me. You spend your whole life trying to work out where you fit.
Here I am.
‘Here we are,’ says Mum, pointing to a big, long white place smothered in carparks and signs and people with bunches of flowers. ‘This is the hospital he’s at.’
Mr Cherry says nothing. His dark eyes look even darker today; he seems to be getting smaller. I’m pretty certain now that I don’t like him. He makes us feel guilty for being in his truck.
We scoot into one of the driveways and as a toll gate comes down in front of us, Mr Cherry digs into a pocket, but before he comes out with anything, Mum puts fifty cents on the dashboard. He takes it and gives it to the man in the glass box. The gate goes up. We’re in.
Zigging and zagging up the bitumen carparks, Mr Cherry finds a space in the end and when he’s fitted us in the space, he turns the engine off.
‘I’ll wait here,’ he says.
‘You sure will,’ Mum mutters. She opens the door.
It isn’t like I remember. This hospital is like the State Government Insurance Office that Dad took me to once: long halls that go nowhere, paintings on the walls that don’t make sense, people rushing past without looking at you. No sick people anywhere. We go through a place where everyone is smoking. It stinks. There’s music, soft and weak. Lifts bong like clocks. Still no sick people.
‘Why didn’t Tegwyn come?’ I ask Mum, who is walking very fast. Her dress is yellow as a duckling. Her shoes are black and a little bit dusty. When she looks down her hair falls into her eyes which are never the same colour twice.
‘Tegwyn came yesterday. She didn’t want to come today.’
‘Is there something wrong with her, do you reckon?’
She looks at me. Her teeth are straight. ‘Ort, I don’t know what’s right and wrong, sometimes.’
Then we’re down another corridor. Down the end on a door it says I.C.U.
‘I.C.U.’
‘Intensive Care Unit,’ she says. ‘That’s where he is.’
Now my heart is jumping around in me.
‘Before we go in, I just want to say something.’
‘Yes?’ I say, wishing she’d said something all the way down in the truck.
‘He looks different to last time you saw him.’
Last time, last time. Geez, it’s such a long time ago, since before the start of the holidays. Last time. There he was, kissing Mum on the face and walking out to the ute with no shirt on and his back the colour of red mud. He had shorts on with elastic in the back, the ones that make your hips crinkly. When he got in the ute and looked out, I saw a gob of grease on his chin. His black hair was tied back in a plait. He was smiling. That was last time.
‘How different?’ I ask.
‘Well, he’s asleep for a start,’ she says with a half-way grin. ‘And he’s been in a terrible accident, of course, and to help him stay alive the doctors have put tubes in some places for food.’
‘For food?’
‘It’s called a drip,’ she says. ‘It’s water with . . . things in it that feed him. And . . .’
‘What else?’ This is getting scary.
‘His mouth doesn’t look very nice, but that’s because he doesn’t use it much. He gets ulcers and sores in it. Things like that.’
‘Oh.’
‘You’ll have to be a bit brave.’
‘I’m not a baby,’ I say, with my own half-way grin. We walk to the door. ‘Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘What’s a compulsive gambler?’
‘Someone,’ she says, ‘someone who gets people hurt.’
I.C.U. Here it is. And in we go.
The room is quiet, oh geez, so really very quiet. A nurse comes up and smiles. She looks real lonely in here. There is a big desk, high like a stage, in the middle of the room. All the walls are glass halfway up. There’s beeps and quiet whooshes.
‘Mrs Flack.’
‘I’ve brought my son.’
‘Only for a moment, then.’
We follow her. My feet are real heavy. It’s hard work walking. I can’t see into any of the rooms. The glass bit is high. We go in one. Everywhere there’s machines like big computers and TV screens.
‘Here he is, Ort,’ Mum whispers.
‘There’s some visitors for you, Mr Flack,’ the nurse says to a long thing on a table. She smiles at us and goes just outside.
Mum bends down and kisses it. When she moves out the way I can see it’s him. His eyes are half open like he’s only half asleep. Tubes come out his nose. Down the side there’s tubes in his leg and arm. His mouth is all black and horrible. Scabby. Everything stinks of cleaning stuff. Everything is shiny. My Dad looks crowded and small in here.
‘Hello, love,’ Mum says, ‘it’s me. I’ve brought Ort with me. He’s come to see you. He’s a bit nervous ’cause they cut off your hair.’
That’s it! His long plait is gone. His hair is all spiky. Mum brings me in close. I can hear him breathing. His hair. His hair.
‘Hello, Daddy,’ I say like I’m a baby or something, ‘it’s me, Ort. You got a nice room here. All computer games. They’re gonna make pinball with computers, Fat reckons. Don’t think you’ll like that, eh? Errol says hullo. I’m going to high school next year. Reckon I’m too young yet. I could stay down for a year, eh?’ Mum touches me on the shoulder. ‘Well, have a good sleep. But wake up, eh? When yer ready.’ Me eyes get hard to see through. ‘Well, Dad, over and out.’ The nurse comes in and gets us.
Before she goes to bed, Mum comes into my room and sits on my bed. I’ve been reading a book I read when I was ten. Mum pats the sheet near my leg. Her gown is loose and I can see the edge of one of those socky boobs of hers. Her hair is up like a big knot of pine and she looks kind of sleepy and I can tell she’s been doing some hard thinking.
‘You were brave today,’ she says.
‘Didn’t need to be. It was still Dad.’
All of a sudden she’s up on the pillow with me and putting her arms around me like she used to when I was really a kid. She is warm and her gown is fluffy and her breath smells like cough medicine and my head is on her shoulder looking down into that long dark crack between those bosoms.
‘I’m proud of you, Ort. You know I love you.’
‘Yes,’ I say real quiet. ‘I know that.’
‘Can you tell me something?’
‘Me?’ It’s a surprise.
‘There’s something I need to know.’
‘What can I tell you?’ I feel all silly.
‘It’s something no one else in the world can tell me.’
And that gets me all frightened and flappy inside.
‘You see . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Well. What was it like when you were asleep in that coma when you were so little? Maybe you don’t remember – I don’t s’pose you do – but I need to know real bad. Can you remember any little thing? You see, people talk, they say all kinds of things, they give you pamphlets and forms to sign until you don’t know your bum from a mineshaft, and . . .’
‘I remember,’ I say, before she starts to cry properly. ‘I remember.’
‘Were you alive?’
‘Course. Course I was alive.’
‘But inside your head. In your sleep. Did you think things? Did you hear things?’
‘Yeah, I heard things, I saw things.’
‘Because some people say your father’s not really alive.’
‘He’s alive. He isn’t dead!’
‘Hush a bit. You’ll wake Grammar up.’
I feel really messed up. I pull my book out from under her leg; it’s all crumpled.
‘What you reading?’ she asks, sniffing.
‘It’s about some kids who go into a weird kind of land through a wardrobe. It’s a Poms’ book. The kids are wet and they talk funny, but . . .’
‘But what?’ She picks the book up and bends it back into shape.
‘It’s not really all that make believe. Things happen.’
‘What things?’
‘Crazy kinda things. You hear things sometimes. See things. You think sometimes you’re somewhere else.’
‘In dreams, you mean?’
I look around the room, at my leaning wardrobe, the picture of Luke Skywalker, at the bits of wood I keep because they look like animals and stuff, the plane Dad made me out of balsa, and then I look at Mum and see her worried face.
‘What if they’re not dreams? What if you’re awake when you go to sleep and dreaming when you wake up?’
‘What if, eh?’ She smiles. ‘I dunno, Ort. I just don’t know about that. I can’t even get me mind to think about it. Maybe it’s all the same thing.’
I shrug. Maybe it is. I don’t even know what we’re talking about anymore.
‘Is Dad coming home?’
‘Yeah, he’s coming home.’
‘When?’
‘When he’s good and ready. He only ever does things when he’s good and ready.’
‘He’s not dead.’
‘I’ll tell them that.’
She kisses me on the cheek and goes, walking a little bit wonky.
Out on the back verandah I can hear something moving around in the grass down past the back fence. Could be a fox or a roo or anything. The sky is very clear tonight. Kind of the same colour as my Dad’s poor mouth. Stars look like they’re moving and still at the same time.
The wind makes a kind of noise in my ear that reminds me of a bell. Not a school bell. Deeper. Bong, in my ear. It makes my toes tingle.
A word slips out of my mouth.
‘Please?’
Chapter Five
TEGWYN AND ME are walking into Bankside this morning because it’s Saturday. I don’t know why we go in on Saturday mornings. We’ve been doing it for years. We just do. Because it’s hot as hell out in the sun, we stick to the shade of the forest edge which makes walking harder with all the logs and holes and bushes to get past, and the snakes to look out for, but it’s not as bad as having your brain casseroled by the sun out near the road. A lot of the time Tegwyn walks in front of me – it’s to save talking. Her hair is back in a big, long bready plait that flaps against her shirt. The plait comes down to my eyes; that’s how tall she is. She’s as big as a grownup woman. Her pink shorts grab her bum and push out half moons at the edges. Sweat all runs down her legs. The flies paddle in it.
Birds crash through the treetops and now and then a car goes past out on the road. When Dad was home we went with him in the ute. He used to like sitting out the front of the pub to drink his lemon squashes in the shade and watch us. Or play pinball in the shop. It was sure faster getting to Bankside in those days. Doesn’t it sound like a long time ago, November.
Flies suck my toe scabs. My thongs smack my heels. Saturday morning. Mum is still asleep, I’ll bet. Never seen her sleep so late in my whole life.
‘Mum hasn’t been in to see Dad for a while,’ I say to Tegwyn’s bouncing plait.
She makes a wet sound. ‘Because that bastard Bill Cherry won’t take ’er in anymore. They had a blue on the way back last time. Couldn’t you see that one coming a mile off. Pah! He’s a greasy little bugger. Like to stick his nose in a mincer and then stuff it in his mouth.’
I just keep walking. She talks like that sometimes.
‘Feels frigging guilty, that’s why. Slimy little bit of cockroach snot.’
Gawd, she makes me guts roll sometimes. ‘Fat reckons they fight. Mr and Mrs Cherry,’ I say.
‘Fight? Course they fight. Wouldn’t you fight if you had to kiss cocky snot in your bed at night? Listen, Small Thing, there’s things you just don’t know.’
‘And there’s things I do,’ I say, quiet, real quiet.
‘Eh?’
‘Nothin’.’
She stops and turns and I walk straight into those big hard lumps on the front of her. She laughs and pushes them together round me ears.
‘What do you know, Small Thing?’
‘Yer tits stink, that’s what I know.’
‘Up yer bum.’
‘Won’t fit.’
Next thing, I’m stuck in a blackboy with me legs in the air and spines up me shirt. By the time I crawl out, she’s way ahead up the track, moons flashing white out of them shorts. She can still be funny, Tegwyn. It proves anyone can be funny, because she must be the saddest, angriest person in the whole world.
In a while we come to the place by the side of the road on a bend where all the dirt and bush is cut up with drag marks and a tree is broken off at the base. We just walk past it like we don’t notice a thing.
Feels like a real long time getting into Bankside. We pass the big sign with its bullet-hole freckles, and the forest is way behind and the sun right on us. Mrs Mack waves from the shade of her verandah as we pass, and pretty soon we’re coming up past the pub. There’s always a strange buzz coming from that pub. It goes: I-I-I-I-I! A man comes out to spit in the drain and look at the sky, and then he goes in again, pushing his hat hard down on his head.
Next to the pub is the drapers which Mr and Mrs Watkins run. It’s got all balls of elastic and bits of material on rolls in the window. And a dummy with no head. And a little cardboard sign that says: Gospel Meetings Sundays 11 a.m. The drapers is always clean and unfriendly. Next to that is the shop. It’s the post office, too, and also a couple of banks. There’s a big verandah with an old sleepy dog and a pinball machine in the shade, and inside the flywire door there’s the proper part of the shop – rows of cans and packets and bottles and boxes. Up the far end is the counter, a long shiny thing with the post office and banks on one side and the cash register at the other. Mr Firth is at the post office with his pencil in his black teeth and his hair all oily and sitting back. Mrs Firth is shaped like an icecream cone, fat at the top and skinny at the bottom. When it’s hot, a map of the world comes up on her face. Africa goes right across her nose. She
always seems to be smelling Africa and not liking it one bit.
Tegwyn and me sit out on the verandah for a bit. Malcolm Musworth is playing pinnies with the machine. He is back from boarding school in the city and his hair is short like his dad’s. His dad owns the pub and a farm twelve miles out with its own manager.
‘G’day,’ I say.
‘Hi, Tegwyn,’ he says, without even looking up from the flashing silver ball.
‘How’s boarding school?’ I ask.
He looks at Tegwyn’s legs. ‘Shithouse.’
‘Doesn’t he look like his old man?’ Tegwyn says to me with a kind of pig-snort and goes inside. The bell tinkles on the door. Malcolm Musworth looks at me.
‘Well, what about it, Ratface?’
I just stand there and can’t say anything. I wonder if he’s gonna belt me up. He’s embarrassed.
‘Piss off, Ort-the-Abort.’
I go for the door.
I get inside to the airconditioning where it’s cooler and closer to Tegwyn. She’s up the corner where the make-up is.
‘Can I’ve a drink?’ I ask.
She gives me a dollar from between those boobs of hers. ‘Get me a Coke,’ she says.
Mr and Mrs Firth watch us. They always watch you to make you nervous and clumsy. From the fridge I get a Coke for Tegwyn and a Weaver & Lock ginger beer for me. Mum says Weaver & Lock make the best ginger beer in the world.
For a while we stand around sipping our drinks, looking at things, just being cool in the airconditioning, listening to the clatter and ring of the pinny machine outside. The big freezers have got cold fog coming up out of them. I walk very slow past the rack of comic books. There is a sign: THIS IS NOT A LIBRARY. IF YOU WANT TO READ THEM, BUY THEM. I walk past so slow my knees shake.