That Eye, the Sky

  ‘What are you?’ Mum whispers.

  ‘A man. A servant.’ He runs his thumbs over Dad’s wonky eyes. ‘Only a man. Like Sam here.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Henry Warburton looks at her and smiles kind of thoughtful, looks at her hands. ‘I really don’t know.’

  Well that puts us all in together. Not one of us knows what the hell’s going on.

  ‘Lil Pickering? Is that you, Lil Pickering?’

  Chapter Seven

  HE’S OUT THERE digging in the vegetable garden. The sun is up over the trees but it’s not too hot yet. The dirt he turns up is all dark and wet underneath. Mum’s corn wobbles in the wind behind him. Cucumbers, zucchinis, tomatoes, lettuce, eggplant: it’s like a picture, and he’s out there in it, like something in the middle of a picture.

  Mum comes out on the verandah with me. Her hair is all over.

  ‘Is he staying, then?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘He’s a bit weird.’

  ‘Ort, you should hear ’em talk about us.’

  ‘He sleeps under the bridge.’ Mum says nothing. I look up and see her with her hair all crazy everywhere and her eyes squinty in the light, and I know she hasn’t heard me.

  At lunch in the loungeroom where it’s cool, we’re all eating salad as quiet as you can eat salad, and Henry Warburton says to me:

  ‘Want me to teach you how to set a rabbit trap, Ort?’ He has a big smile and a piece of lettuce on his chin.

  ‘I orready know. My Dad taught me when I was six.’

  ‘Oh.’ He laughs. ‘No teaching you any new tricks, then.’

  I don’t look up from my plate.

  ‘Sam . . . is very good with him.’

  ‘That’s because he’s my father.’

  Everyone laughs and I dunno what’s so funny.

  All afternoon he works in the vegetable garden and the weeds pile up on the ground outside the wire that goes around it. The whole yard smells of fresh dirt. Reminds me of being little again when I used to eat it. He ties tomato plants up straight and pinches off little buds. In a box he puts long zucchinis and eggplants, a lettuce, some onions and a carrot. He doesn’t sing or anything when he works. His back is white and wet in the sun. His daggy pants get real dirty. At the end of the afternoon I go and help him throw the weeds in to the chooks because I know Dad would be ashamed of me watching someone else work in the sun all day. When we are washing the vegetables under the tap at the tank, he looks up at my bat on the verandah.

  ‘Wanna hit?’ he says, pulling a face at the eggplant.

  ‘Can you play french cricket?’ I ask.

  ‘I invented it.’

  ‘Bull.’

  ‘Well, I can play it, anyway.’ He laughs.

  We leave the vegies to dry on the back verandah and get the bat and the ball and start to play. He hits out of my reach. His big long chin digs into his chest and his funny eyes go everywhere so you don’t know where the ball will go. He plays good and it makes me a bit mad and makes me feel okay. Then he hits an easy catch. I get it in one hand.

  ‘You’re not trying,’ I say. ‘You let me get that.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘You shouldn’t ever knock back a bit of help,’ he says, pulling up his awful, dirty pants.

  ‘I don’t need it.’

  ‘Everyone needs it,’ he says. ‘Sooner or later.’

  I take the bat from him. He grabs my hand and it makes me look at his face. He’s kind of smiling. He doesn’t look so bad, really. My hand is small next to his, but harder and darker.

  ‘You’re a good man, Ort,’ he says. The ball is in his other hand. It’s just the cork guts of an old ball. In his hand it looks like a fresh bird’s egg, like it might break if he squeezed it.

  ‘Why did you work in the garden?’ I ask. ‘No one asked you to.’

  ‘It needed doing,’ he says, holding my hand and the ball, looking from one to the other.

  ‘What’s that book you got inside?’

  ‘A wise book.’

  ‘What’s it got in it?’

  ‘Dreams, stories, poems, advice, jokes.’

  ‘Nothing about cricket, I s’pose.’

  He smiles at me like I’m really dumb.

  ‘That was a joke,’ I say. He lets go my hand.

  ‘You are a good man. Wait’ll they publish your gags. The Portable Ort.’ Then he bowls quick, underarm and high on the bat and I kind of jump out the way and the ball nicks the edge of the bat and runs away on the hard dirt. He grabs it and lobs it across to me and I turn like a baseballer and hit it high. It goes up into the blue so you can hardly see it, but Henry Warburton is running across the yard with his big hands up and those dumb dirty pants flapping. He yodels as he runs and it kind of makes me laugh. His feet flop across the dirt. He runs backwards. The ball comes down. He leans back and gets it in one hand and then his feet go up above his head and he goes over the fence backwards with a yell, and comes down hard and laughing thin like a loonie. When I get to him I stop dead and look at the hole in his head where an eye was.

  ‘It’s orright,’ he says, winded, ‘it’s glass. It’s a false. Eye. Just come. Out with the fall.’ I find it for him in the dirt. It looks like an ace marble, a tombola or something. He wipes it and puts it back in. It doesn’t look so bad.

  ‘How’d it happen?’

  ‘When I was at school. Nngth. Was playing first slip. Ball hit me in the face. Crushed the eye.’

  I help him get up. I feel sorry for him about the eye. Half his pants are still on the top barb of the fence. Mum is on the back verandah laughing.

  I love it when we sit out here at night feeling the hot day go away and listen to the forest making its night noise. Sometimes when a car goes past out on the road, you get kind of surprised that there are other people in the world. Before his accident Dad used to sit out here with us and play sad songs on his guitar and tell stories. Like about the time Grammar had a fight with a man at a dance where she was playing piano and she knocked out his teeth with one hand and kept playing the bass part of ‘On Moonlight Bay’ with the other. He used to sleep in a box with California Navels written on it on top of the piano. He reckons that’s why he always sleeps with music in his head. On nights like this Mum and Dad remember things and tell us. It’s like the forest and the sky make them remember. Mum has stories, but she only lets them out in bits here and there.

  ‘Be Christmas soon,’ Tegwyn says. She files her nails.

  Henry Warburton moves his bum to get comfortable. He’s down against the verandah post. Dad is next to me on the lazyboy. Mum is in the cane chair. Tegwyn is in the hammock. It’s dark, but I can see them all in the light from above the roof.

  ‘What do you do for Christmas here?’ Henry Warburton asks.

  Mum sniffs. ‘Oh, get a turkey. Go down to the creek for a swim. Muck around.’

  ‘Get bored,’ Tegwyn says.

  ‘Not me,’ I say.

  ‘That’s ’cause you’re still a kid.’

  ‘He’s going to high school next year,’ Henry Warburton says. ‘He’s half grownup.’

  ‘He’s too immature.’

  Hope I am. Then I’ll stay down and get out of high school. I don’t want me head put down the dunny.

  ‘You know what they call first years?’ Tegwyn says. ‘Melons. Yer gonna be a melon, Ort.’

  ‘Least I’ll be a watermelon,’ I say, thinking of all those dunnies, ‘you were a pigmelon, Tegwyn.’

  ‘Cut it out, you two.’

  Henry Warburton laughs and then he says that strange word, ‘Nngth.’

  ‘What’s that word?’ I say.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he says.

  ‘Ort.’ Everyone gets embarrassed.

  ‘It’s a thing I have,’ he says. ‘A speech impediment.’

  ‘Oh.’ Geez, he’s got troubles, eh.

  ‘Time for bed, Ort.’

  ‘But it’s hol
idays, it’s early.’

  ‘Well read, then,’ she says. ‘You can go too, Tegwyn.’

  ‘Are you staying the night?’ Tegwyn says to Henry Warburton. He doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Yes,’ says Mum. ‘He’ll sleep in the loungeroom.’

  Tegwyn sniffs. We go in. She slams her door. Me too.

  I open my window. It’s too hot to sleep yet. I can hear talk coming down in bits from the back verandah, and I wonder what they’re saying out there where it’s cool and good. So I do it. I climb out the window, crouch on the warm dirt for a minute, and then scrub along to the back of the house and sit in the dark at the corner. I can hear Errol scratching on the dunny roof. The light from that cloud makes the dirt in the backyard look mysterious, like the face of the moon.

  ‘How long you been out here?’ Henry Warburton asks my Mum. I can’t see ’em because I’m just behind the corner of the house.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘sixteen years, more. Since just before I had Tegwyn. Sam and I came out from the city to try to get away from a lot of things. We were optimistic. Everyone was in those days. You know, there was Bob Dylan and the Beatles and everyone. We were hippies.’ She keeps talking like she can’t stop, like she hasn’t done it for a long time. Which isn’t true, ’cause we’re here to talk to all the time. ‘Sam and I met back in ’67. There was a house in Subiaco where lots of people used to crash and come and go. Some got permanent. I’d chucked my job in; I’d been working as a secretary for a mining company. I just got fed up with being handled from behind.’ She laughs. ‘So I was living off savings. Running away from my father, too. He and me didn’t get on. He was getting pretty rich from this fleet of hire cars he had. He thought he could treat Mum and me like we worked for him. Mum swallowed it, but I couldn’t. She was used to it. Women of her age were used to it. Sorry, I keep getting sidetracked.’

  ‘Keep talking.’

  ‘Well anyway, I was living up the back of this house and Sam was living up the front. The house was full of muso types and people doing drugs. There was a guy who wrote poetry – what a prick. All of us used to sit around the fire in winter and just talk and talk like it was the most important thing in the world to be doing. People argued and cried all over each other. Sometimes it was fun. Other times it was just scary.

  ‘You could tell there was something up between me and Sam ’cause I could never look at him and he could never play guitar in front of me. He was playing in a band called The Grasshoppers. This is gonna sound dumb . . . but one night when the talk got really intellectual and I couldn’t understand it any more – I tell you, people who write poetry are such pricks —’

  ‘I’ve written a bit myself,’ Henry Warburton says.

  ‘Oh.’

  He just laughs.

  ‘Well, it mightn’t be true for everyone. Anyway, this night I got sick of it and went outside. I felt really thick, going out, like I was stupid or something, but I couldn’t take it any more. And I bumped into Sam on the front verandah in the dark. He’d been out there longer than me. We were both really embarrassed, but I cracked a joke about poets and that made it easier. Well, that was all it took. That was the start of it all. We went walking, walked all night talking about things, telling stories about ourselves, bitching about the others in the house, till we found ourselves walking around Kings Park. That’s a great place, you know, a big slab of bush right in the middle of the city. And there we were, walking around in this big bit of bush with all these trees around us and animals moving around, and Sam says, “You know, Alice Ann Benson, when we get married, we’ll go and live amongst trees like these. People should always live near trees”. And then we came out of the bush and there below us was the city with all the lights and cars and those big buildings and flashing signs. It was like looking over the whole world all of a sudden. We had a fight straight away. We argued for hours.

  ‘But I married him. We hitched up here into the hills. I still had some money. We found this little place; it used to be a ranger’s house before they opened the national park for felling. We’ve tacked rooms onto it over the years. We came up here and lived like hippies, growing our own vegies and milk, living near the trees – it was pretty romantic, you know. But it was hard to keep it up. I got pregnant and we got scared and Sam got work pumping petrol over the road. He had no trade or anything, but the Parkinsons – the people who owned the roadhouse in those days – taught him how to be a mechanic. He still hasn’t got his ticket, or anything. It was crazy, a hippie working on machines. He even got to like it. He likes fast cars. It . . . doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘You okay?’

  She’s sniffing.

  ‘I’ll be alright.’

  ‘He can hear us, you know.’

  ‘How do you know what he can hear?’ she says, real angry. ‘Who are you to say? He’s all busted up because of that greedy little pig Bill Cherry and fast cars and because he’s a good man. Are you gunna fix him up? What right have you got?’

  Then it’s real quiet. After a long time, Warburton makes a hawk sound in his throat and says, ‘She’s got me there, Sam.’

  For a while they sit there being real quiet and I push my toes into the dirt to feel it go cool. It’s funny, you know, even though I’m immature and too young for my age, I feel older since Dad had his prang. I haven’t tried to be, though I should’ve. It’s just come on me and I didn’t even know it. Well I think it has. How do you tell? These holidays better last. I don’t want them to go quick. High school keeps coming up in my mind. I can see it at the corner of my eye sometimes when I’m thinking, and I keep it there. Geez, I don’t want to grow up. Being immature is okay.

  Mum sounds like she’s finished her story. If I was her, I’d ask him for his. It’s time he said something that makes sense.

  Sad about Fat. I still like Fat. But I never see him now.

  ‘So,’ Mum says with a sniff. ‘That’s how we got here. Right now it looks like a nice dream turned bad. We weren’t even real hippies. And now look at us – local yokels. We’re more country than the country. But what about you? You’re not giving much away.’

  ‘Oh . . .’

  ‘It’s rude to let people spill their guts and then not do the same.’

  ‘Have you done that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t talk much with people, do you?’ he asks.

  ‘Sam is all I need. He’s all I put my trust in.’

  I reckon Henry Warburton wants to keep us in the dark. From here you can hear Dad’s whistling throat. It’s not such a bad sound, kind of familiar and reassuring now. Reminds me that he’s listening in, too. And they talk like we’re both not here.

  ‘Well,’ Mum says, ‘where and when were you born?’

  ‘Geraldton, 1942.’

  ‘You’re older than us.’

  ‘You sound surprised.’

  ‘Living around Ort and Tegwyn, you feel like you’re the oldest thing in the world. No, I’m not surprised. You don’t wear it well.’

  ‘Shame I can’t slight you so gently in the same manner,’ Warburton says. ‘But for a woman living like you, working hard, away from cosmetics, roughing it, you’ve done well.’

  ‘I wasn’t meaning that,’ Mum says, kind of cool with him. ‘I meant you look tired and sick of things.’

  ‘I am. But you’re the one who should be tired and fed up.’

  ‘I’ve got no reason to be. I live a good life.’

  ‘And you guard it jealously, like your pride.’

  ‘I don’t like people speaking to me like that.’

  ‘Well,’ Warburton says, ‘you’ve got a cheek. You just finished telling me how decrepit I look. A man has pride, too, you know.’

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ she says. ‘I live with two of them.’

  ‘Geraldton must be the windiest town on this earth.’

  ‘What?’

  Talk, talk, talk!

  ‘Geraldton,’ he says. ‘The trees grow at right angles to the
ground. There’s miles of sand dunes. Everything is clogged up with salt. A hell of a town.’ He laughs. Across the fence and over the road, the lights are still on at Cherrys’ roadhouse. AMPOL, the sign says, THE AUSTRALIAN COMPANY. You can see the lights on in the bowsers. The bowsers look like little robots waiting for something to happen.

  ‘I went to Geraldton once,’ Mum says, sounding a bit happier now. ‘I had an uncle who was a crayfisherman. He got rich quick and lost the lot. Went to Indonesia.’

  ‘Hell of a town.’

  ‘What did your parents do?’

  ‘Tried to stay married. My mother was a sculptress and my father was an Anglican priest.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yes. And there was I in the middle,’ Warburton says. ‘I think they both tried hard to be what they thought they had to be. I don’t know. They were in competition. My father was a very popular priest. People used to drive in from miles out to hear him. Mum was successful too, in a small way. I was a believer, you know . . . well a kind of believer.’

  There is quiet for a while.

  ‘Why did you say that?’ Mum says. I can hear her sandals scraping on the boards.

  ‘Don’t know. Think I’ll go in. I’m really tired.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’ll help you with Sam.’

  As I scoot down the side of the house to my window, I see my shadow, fat and grey, running beside me. It’s like running under a full moon. But, of course, there’s no moon, only that crazy cloud up there.

  Chapter Eight

  MY EYES OPEN, and morning comes hot and white in the window. A dream is going out of me, out and away, leaving me awake and kind of sad. It was a crazy dream. I thought it was real, I really did. It was a crazy dream but it seemed right.

  I was out at the edge of the forest just lying on my back, looking up at the moon. The moon was pale – it was daytime. Birds mucked about in the jarrah trees. It was nice there. I could smell the leaves on the ground. I could smell myself. Sometimes I can smell myself and it’s okay. (It’d be awful to smell bad, like Malcolm Musworth.) As I was lying there with ants going past, feeling good because there were no jobs to do, I felt the ground go all funny, like it was shivering. The shivers went into my back. It made me feel cold and strange. I stayed there for a bit and it went away. A white bird flew past and went over the house. No one was around, not Mum or Tegwyn or anyone. Then it came again, the ground shivering like it was cold or frightened or finishing a leak, or something. Fences jangled around and twigs and leaves came down out the trees. I stood up. The house was kind of puffing and panting. I saw it from where I was – walls going in and out. So, I started running. I was thinking about Dad. I jumped the fence and Errol came flying at me and hit me in the chest and stayed there, and I stopped to look at the windows going up and down and the doors flapping. The ground shook. It made my legs all funny. I looked around for everyone else but there was no one. The sky went cloudy and dark. Then there was a crack like a tree splitting and falling and the back door came open and the house sucked me off me feet, sucked me in, and I flew in, feet-first into the dark house. Inside, everything was shaking. Like the house was taking off. I moved around falling everywhere, kicking things over. Plates and cups came out of the cupboards and smashed on the floor, the piano was going like a cut cat, playing something I never heard before, the TV was on its face, smashed, sliding across the room. That sofa with the crummy brown flowers was running around the loungeroom and I got the hell out. I could hear nails squealing out the floorboards. I lay in the hall. Suddenly, all the doors opened and closed and everything went dark and quiet. It took a while to get quiet, like it was winding down. Scraping noises went on for a while and something smashed and a nail hit the ceiling and then it was quiet except for little bits of plaster coming down on the boards. And then nothing. I was in the hall. All the doors were closed. It was dark. I was near pooping meself. I could hear me own heart whacking away. And then the lights started, blue, green, red, white, purple, blue, green, red, white . . . and it was like the inside of a fire. I couldn’t tell where they were coming from, those colours. They got brighter and brighter till I could see all down the hallway to the back door, and then down the hallway came Dad. He was in the raw and asleep, and kind of sliding along the floor on his back, like he was being sucked along like I was, only slower. When he got to me, his feet touched mine and he stopped. That’s when the lights slowed down, got fainter. I didn’t know what the hell to do – I didn’t know it was a dream – so I didn’t do anything. The hole in Dad’s neck was open and I heard him whistling. And then out of the cracks and holes in the walls and doors, all the holes I watch the family with, this white, thick light came, all going above us near the ceiling till it made a ball, a fat, mushy ball of white light. It stayed there for a bit and I just looked at it and felt like I wasn’t frightened anymore and didn’t care that I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I watched as a little finger of light came out of the ball, getting longer, coming down to us. It pointed around – at one wall, the back door, the other wall, me, then Dad. And then it slid down to Dad and poked around for a bit and went in the hole in his throat. The ball of light got smaller and smaller as it kind of untangled and went into Dad and he started to shine white. He got so white I could hardly look. He was really white, like, like, like . . . really, really white, and I thought he was getting up, full of this light, but then I woke up . . . and here I am, kicking the sheet down, awake, and knowing already that today is gonna be a scorcher.