Mum wrings out her flannel, puffing a bit.
‘I thought you only got it once,’ she says. ‘Any more questions, Morton Flack ?’
‘Will that scar always be there, where they cut his throat open?’
‘Some things never go away.’
After tea and all the praying and reading and doing the Lord’s Supper with sherry and bread, we drag Dad out onto the verandah to watch the sun go down. Grammar sings to herself in her room. Tegwyn goes in and plays the piano hard like she’s poking all its teeth out.
We sit out here and see the night coming, and wait for Henry Warburton. Mozzies come around. The light up on the house shows the eyes at the edge of the forest, but Henry Warburton doesn’t show.
Mornings and nights go past. Tegwyn won’t talk. She beats the piano up and it makes these kind of yells that are music. Maybe Henry Warburton isn’t coming back, like he’s baptized us and now he’s off for good. Just dumped God all over us. Things are bad, real bad. Everyone’s thinking the same thing, I reckon. And Christmas getting closer, and Dad so heavy to carry to the bath every day.
‘You think we could wash him in bed?’ I say to Mum as we go in to get him.
‘He’s not in hospital now,’ she says. ‘Sam Flack can take a bath like any normal man.’
Every day we drag him out. I don’t sleep good. Worse than normal. All night I lie on my bed, looking up at the daddy-long-legs hanging off my reading light. Makes you feel like the only person left in the world, like everyone else is dead. Sometimes I read the story about the Pommie kids going through the wardrobe into a strange land, and once I even try myself; I get in my wardrobe and close the door and wait, but all that happens is the stink of old socks makes me want to sick up.
In the days I help Mum or muck around in the forest or down at the creek. And some nights when I don’t sleep and can’t think myself away, I get up and walk quiet around the house to check on everyone. I go down the hall and look in on Tegwyn. Her light is still on. Through a hole I see her on the bed. In her mouth is a smoke. A smoke! She sucks on it and makes kind of smoke doughnuts that go up to the ceiling and squash flat. She has no clothes on, sitting there smoking. On her tits there’s red marks – all over – like she’s got chicken pox or something. She has another puff. I wonder if I should tell. No. Real careful she takes the smoke out of her mouth and looks at the hot end and puts it on one tit and shivers. Burning! Oh, geez. Oh, geez. I go down the hall and out the back and a bit of sick comes up. I don’t get it. I don’t. Why does she do things like that? Why is she unhappy all the time? Why does she hate us?
‘Is that you, Lil Pickering?’
I go inside and see Grammar. I sit next to her and pick up her old yellow hand from off the sheet.
‘Who you listening for, Grammar? Who you hearing all the time?’ She snores. In olden days she must have been beautiful, old Gram. And her music, too. She was married to a policeman, that was my Grampa who I never saw. Dad says they lived in country towns all over. Margaret River, Bridgetown, Manjimup, York. He kept getting transferred and she went with him, playing the music and having babies. That’s Dad’s brothers and sisters. Not worth a zac, he reckons.
‘Is? Is . . .?’
‘Who’s there, Gram?’
‘Walking near . . . oh, biscuits . . . jam . . .’
I go up the hall and check on Mum and Dad. They have the sheet down. Mum has Dad’s hand on her belly.
I go back to bed. I take the Bible off the kitchen table with me. I turn my light on. The daddy-long-legs runs off. I read for a bit to get sleepy.
You are beautiful, my darling, as Tirzah,
lovely as Jerusalem,
majestic as troops with banners.
Turn your eyes from me;
they overwhelm me.
Your hair is like a flock of goats
descending from Gilead.
Your teeth are like a flock of sheep
coming up from the washing.
What a poem! This bloke taking the Michael out of his girlfriend for being ugly and for dropping her falsies in the washing. What a book. Stories! Pompous Pilot, Juders, Holly Ghosts. Doesn’t get me sleepy at all.
Christmas Eve comes slow enough, waiting out on the verandah each night after tea, but it gets here. Mum is so tired when she gets up, she can’t stop crying. We try to get Dad out the bed for his bath before breakfast because there’s lots to do for tomorrow. But we’re too tired and Mum can’t stop crying. So I get the wheelchair. I jam me fingers in it trying to open it and that makes Mum cry worse. We get Dad in it, and wheel him down the hall with Mum blubbering on him. She hates the wheelchair.
I pray at breakfast. ‘Jesus fix us up. We’re breaking to bits here. Make us happy tomorrow on your birthday, Amen.’ Mum pours big cups of sherry for the Lord’s Supper and we are a bit happier. Then she starts cooking the cakes and I go out to do the chooks for tomorrow.
Not so bad when you’ve done it before. I kill two chooks with the machete. I’m holding a chook with no head, letting the blood go on the dirt, when I look across and see a big, high, green truck at the roadhouse and men bringing mattresses and chairs out to it. Out the front is a FOR SALE sign. I see Fat carrying a box and I look away.
All day you can smell cakes and bickies cooking. By late in the day, the Cherrys have gone, moved away. I go over and do something I can’t stop. I piddle under their back door. I used to piddle in the middle of the road at night, going round and round like a drill. It made a piss ring that dried and would stay there three days. Don’t know why I used to do it, but. Piddling under the Cherrys’ door is worse, but I don’t stop – just keep hosing it under. Then I snoop around the back for a bit, looking at the pieces of newspaper under the clothesline, an old shoe, the empty bit of dunny roll. And then I see something for Mum and grab it and carry it back real careful.
After tea we bring out Dad and even Grammar onto the verandah. No one says anything. Tegwyn sits on her legs with her eyes closed. I listen hard to the forest. Think I hear something. Yes. A bell. A bell ringing: bong, bong, in the forest. I’ve heard it before.
‘Can you hear that bell?’ I ask everyone.
‘More crap from you,’ Tegwyn says.
‘Bell?’ says Mum, kind of ratty.
‘Yeah, hear it?’
‘Oh, that.’
‘You hear it?’ I can’t believe it. Someone else gets my visions.
‘It’s a big piece of steel or something down at the mill, Ort,’ Mum says, like she’s got no time for this. ‘It bangs around in a westerly. Used to give me the willies once.’
I can’t say anything. It hurts, you know. I don’t say one thing. All me guts goes tight and hot.
For a long time it’s just quiet out here on the verandah.
‘Well, this is bloody cheerful,’ Tegwyn says.
‘Tegwyn, please —’
‘Happy Christmas, everyone!’
‘Let’s . . . let’s sing carols, then,’ Mum says. She’s almost bawling.
‘Oh, Gawd.’
‘Well, what do you suggest, Miss Smarty Pants? You got any better ideas? You got any ideas at all in your bloody selfish head? Life isn’t tailor-made just for you, you know! There’s other people to consider here. Sick people. Tired people. There’s better people than you here.’
Tegwyn stands up. ‘Go to hell. I’m getting a job.’
‘What, you’re gonna wait in your room till a job comes out here asking you to do it?’
‘I hate your guts,’ Tegwyn says. ‘You’re weak in the head, pathetic. You’re a hick, a burnt-out hippy from the olden days. And now you’re born-again, bashing the Bible and Holy Jesus. I think you’re crap.’
Mum’s face is moving in the dark. You can see it jumping around. ‘Come here,’ she says. Tegwyn stays put. ‘Come here, please, Tegwyn.’ Tegwyn is smiling.
‘Okay, beat me up. Make bruises on me, make blood come out everywhere. Show ’em how pathetic you are.’ Then she walks across to Mum w
ith a white smile in the dark. Mum stands up. I squint, wait for it. Suddenly, Mum grabs her and her arms go round her hard so you can hear the air coming out of Tegwyn. Mum’s hands lock like they’ll need bolt-cutters to undo. She squeezing.
‘I love you,’ Mum says. ‘I love you. Love you. Love you.’ And then Tegwyn is bawling and all saggy and smaller-looking, and they stay like that for a long time.
Later we sing ‘Silent Night’ and it makes me sad. In my brain I can see Jesus getting born, but I can’t see his face. In the end I give him my face. Could be worse for him; there’s uglier people than me.
The bell rings. That light still glows. I have a bit of a bawl in the second verse.
Christmas. We give our presents. It’s pretty weak, this year. Mum gives me Dad’s walking hat, the one with the budgie feathers in it. She gives Tegwyn a brooch; I’ve seen it before, it’s one of hers. I give Tegwyn the black smooth stone I found down at the creek once. We both get real embarrassed. I give Dad the tools in the pillowslip and the Pirelli calendar – Mum looks like she’s gonna chuck a wobbly until I go out and get her present. It’s the sunflower I pinched from the back of the roadhouse. She kisses me. She cries. Now I know for sure – we really haven’t got much money. The Dole isn’t a lot of money.
Mum puts the chooks in the oven and I scrub the fresh little spuds and Tegwyn picks peas; it starts to smell like Christmas. I bring Grammar and Dad into the loungeroom. The stove growls.
Suddenly there’s a bang from somewhere. We all stop what we’re doing. A car noise. I go outside, and down the long drive comes a yellow car, old and farting, rolling down the drive towards me, and there he is – Henry Warburton at the wheel.
‘Well, Morton, old son,’ he says, pulling into the shade behind the house, his elbow out the window, ‘what do you reckon?’
‘It’s a heap.’
‘Cut it out, it’s an original 1958 FC Holden Special.’
Mum and Tegwyn come out. Mum is wiping her hands on the hem of her dress and you can see all her legs. Tegwyn walks like she’s in no hurry for anyone. Henry Warburton gets out and leans against the 1958 FC Holden Special. It groans a bit, sniffs, and ticks. It stinks of burning oil. The back door is wired on with coathangers. The red seats are all furry and busted. The tyres are balder than babies’ bums.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Mum says, real quiet and angry.
‘Doing business,’ Henry Warburton says with a smile. He looks clean, with new clothes on. ‘Working on your behalf, I might say.’
‘What’ve you done?’ Mum looks real worried and nearly as old as Mrs Cherry. Where’d you get this heap of rubbish?’
‘No one’s taken to the old FC yet, I see.’
‘It’s a heap of crap,’ Tegwyn says.
‘I sold the wreck of Sam’s ute and bought this.’
‘But how . . . without . . . because . . . papers and things —’
‘All organized.’
‘How?’
‘Today, people, we’re all going on an outing. It’s Christmas Day, day of rest and rejoicing, day of contemplation – though not too exhaustive – and day of thanking the Lord for what is. Where to, kids?’
‘The reservoir,’ Tegwyn says.
‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘the reservoir.’
‘But lunch isn’t ready,’ Mum says, kind of smiling.
‘We’ll take it with us,’ he says.
‘Let’s do it!’ Tegwyn yells.
‘At least wait until it’s cooked,’ Mum says.
‘Righto,’ Henry Warburton says as he puts up the bonnet.
New pine forests pass by. Henry Warburton’s 1958 FC Holden Special farts and rattles and takes us up the road real slow, but it’s enough to make you feel rich anyway. Bees splat on the windscreen; honey gurps out of them and spreads in the wind. The smell of hot grass comes in the windows. There’s the smell of Christmas lunch all wrapped in tea-towels in the cardboard box on my knees. The wind gets in Grammar’s hair and it goes all grey and white everywhere so you can’t see how old she is. Dad is next to her, awake and blinking in the wind. His shirt is yellow, flapping, with the sun on it. I muck around with the ashtray that’s in the back of the seat. There’s butts and ash and bits of lolly paper in it and a mean kind of smell. I look at the back of the heads in front. Henry Warburton’s hair is flat-greasy with snowy bits of white sticking to it and getting on his shoulders. He’s singing and thumping the wheel. Tegwyn’s hair is down and kinky from being plaited, and pouring all over the seat with little worms and snakes of it dancing in the wind and tickling my nose. I can see over her shoulder she’s mucking around with knobs and vents and things. Mum’s hair is down too and brushed; it looks like white wood and smells good enough to eat.
We turn off onto a smaller road and go downhill where trees are thick and shady and make big pools of shade on the road. Silver water. The dam. Brown stones. Some barbecues. And no one around at all. Next to the water, in the shade, we spread tarps and blankets and bring out the box and Dad and Grammar, and Henry Warburton has four bottles of beer. He says a prayer and flicks the tops off. We lie back, push Dad and Grammar back to back and get into it. Birds go mad in the trees and the water flashes and the ants come and everyone is eating and laughing and sighing and blowing the white off the top off their beer with gravy under their noses and peas in their laps. Wishbones, the parson’s nose, baked spuds, long burps, and me guts sticks out like I swallowed the 1958 FC Holden Special itself.
III
Chapter Thirteen
I SIT UP in bed so fast it cracks my back. He’s screaming, calling out. Fall out of bed. Down the hall to the closed door of the loungeroom where Henry Warburton still sleeps, ever since Christmas. Put my eye to the keyhole, and there he is, on his mattress in the raw with his sheet kicked down and his old fella sticking up like a flagpole again, and in the moonlight there’s tears on his face, and he says real quiet:
‘Go away.’
I step back from the door.
‘No. Away.’
Can he see me?
‘Bobo. Oh God! No. Hmph!’
I go back to bed and lie down and watch the light from the full moon and the cloud on the roof come pouring in through the curtains like it’s milk from a bucket. What makes me think milk is the cow Henry Warburton bought for us. She’s called Margaret and she’s brown and white with big tits hanging down. I’m learning to get the milk out of ’em. When you got your ear against her belly when you’re pulling milk out, you can hear sounds you’d think came from Star Wars. Ooowup-wup-wup . . . owkss-ut . . . gbolp . . . reeet. It’s like cows talk five languages in their three guts.
Six weeks we’ve had Margaret. Mum reckons we’re all getting fat from the cream. Dad’s drinking it with a straw. At least he’s doing that much. Henry Warburton sells things, bits of stuff from the sheds, to buy feed.
Down the highway we go in the 1958 FC Holden Special, farts, squeaks, smoke and all, three of us across the front seat like real hoons with our elbows out the windows. If there was a radio we’d have it going flat-chat, boy. Down the highway, through Bankside, past the paddocks full of stumps, and down to where you can see the city going all the way to the sea.
‘I think you’re supposed to go to your nearest suburban office,’ Henry Warburton says. ‘I know. I’ve been on the dole more times than you’ve pouted at yourself in the mirror.’
‘I don’t care,’ Tegwyn says. ‘I wanna go to the big one in town. I don’t wanna work in the foothills or out on the limits. I wanna get a job in the city, in the offices, the skyscrapers.’
‘Regardless —’
‘Look,’ she says, putting her feet up on the dash, ‘you said you’d take me. Anyway, this car belongs to the Flacks. Me and Small Thing here are Flacks – that’s two against one.’
So we go all the way in, through the places where there’s houses and lawns and cars in cement drives, and trees all along the roads, past factories and streets and streets of car yards with little p
lastic flags out front, to where you can’t see anything but walls and windows and red-orange-green lights and people walking and cars bumpered up as far as you can see.
And then up in this car park that’s like the inside of a big cake, round and round, up and up, until we get to the roof in the sun and find a spot. We get out and look across the city. The river is fat and blue and buildings come up white out of the ground like they’re brand-new.
‘Let’s go,’ Henry Warburton says.
‘Wish Mum was here,’ I say.
‘She hates the city,’ Henry Warburton answers.
‘Alright by me,’ says Tegwyn. Her jeans are so tight you can nearly read the size of her undies.
‘I don’t wanna be a bloody check-out-chick at Woolworths!’
‘That’s if you’re lucky,’ Henry Warburton says as we get into the 1958 FC Holden Special.
‘Are we still going to the beach?’ I ask, putting me feet up on the glovebox.
‘Shut your face, Small Thing.’
‘Your sister is learning slowly, Ort, that her services aren’t in any more demand than those million and a half others who’re trying to get a job. But don’t worry,’ he says with a laugh, ‘she knows what she’s on about. She’s an adult now.’
‘Up your bum, preacher.’
Henry Warburton winks at me and starts the car. ‘I think the beach would be lovely, Ort. Might even cool someone off.’
The beach is the whitest flaming thing you’ve ever seen in your life! Black car parks, green water, and white sand that goes for miles. You squint as you walk across it, through oily brown people on blankets and under brollies with radios going and babies crying. Some girls with their boobs showing, brown things with eyes that watch you go past. Geez.
Tegwyn and me get in the water with a run and a dive like all the other people are doing. I come up with me mouth full of sand and me nose all skinned. We swim out to where everyone is standing. It’s quiet and flat and people talk, but they’re always looking out to sea. Maybe they’re looking for Rottnest. Tegwyn and me duck-dive and swim around. Tegwyn stands on her hands so her legs come out the water and people whistle. Then the whole place goes mad. People swimming out to sea, wading, paddling at the water with their hands. Blokes on surfboards turning round and going like hell. Takes me a while to see the big lines coming in like a convoy of wheat trucks, some with bits of white blowing back off the top like wheat dust coming off the load.