‘Spudtacular comes round the bend with Alligator-tater close behind. Mish-mash makes a last go of it, but it’s Spudtacular who comes away with a strong win!’
Margie’s house is right across the road from the bus stop on the corner of Canon Street. She’d made me some pikelets for morning tea and that day I chose strawberry jam with cream. Mum got to work on Margie’s toenails, so I went outside and ran my fingertips along the rose bushes. Margie says they’re like the pretty girls at her school: nice to look at but prickly as all hell.
Then I heard something. Scratch and scrabble, twist and turn as the baby birds wriggled closer to one another. They were in one of the big gum trees on the other side of the fence. The shadows came. Moved across the paddock like ghost horses that used to run wild across the fields when no one lived here at all. They came fast those shadows. I looked up and saw dark clouds swirling. Now, don’t get me wrong, clouds are usually good because they hold the rain. But magic is a powerful thing. Sometimes it can turn the world upside down.
The baby birds were crying out loud. Hungry squawking babies calling for their mama to feed them. And I was scared they’d be lost in the storm, that the winds might tear their nest apart and send them flying. As I climbed the tree I could hear Mum’s voice travelling on the wind. I saw her in the distance out by Margie’s back door. Her hair was whipping round her face and she had to hold it back with one hand.
‘Dylan…DYLAN!’
I felt her fear whooshing out like a flood, rising up and filling my lungs. But it was too late to do anything so I just held on. Mum started to climb the tree and my eyes locked with hers through the howling wind and the booming thunder. I looked up to the sky, begging the clouds to stop.
In that flash of a second I took my eyes off Mum and she fell. The branch broke clean away and she went back towards the ground before I could scream, ‘Wait, sorry clouds, don’t hurt my mum, I was the one who made you angry! Throw me into the sky and toss me round like a ragdoll, but leave Mum alone!’ In slow motion my arm reached out to hers and hers to mine.
As soon as she hit the ground the wind stopped blowing, the clouds floated away and the birds stopped their crying. Stillness bleeding through my ears. Margie standing by the porch, one hand leaning on the wall and the other on her bad hip. She didn’t want to move, didn’t want to see what had happened. I slid down the tree, fingers peeling off the bark in big strips as I went. Thud, I hit the ground, scrambled over to Mum. Her left leg was bent back the wrong kind of way. I brushed a strand of hair out of her face. How could she look so lovely and be dead at the same time? I tried to breathe life back into Mum. I pumped her chest, but beyond those beautiful glassy eyes everything was broken. A plague of cicadas was trapped in my head, a pounding drone. I wanted to run through the fields away from it all, back to the house where Mum was still humming to Serge Gainsbourg or calling that potato race.
When that police lady came she tried to pull my fingers back off Mum’s arm, but I growled at her so loud it scared me too. Cars arrived and lots of people moved about, but all I could understand was Margie saying, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I need to sit down. Oh, my Lord.’
The police lady sat by my side the whole time and talked softly. She wouldn’t let anyone else near me until the sun had set and a whisper on the wind told me it was time to go. It was getting cold and the heat from Mum had gone. I could feel all these eyes watching when I went with that police lady. She had to help me walk because I felt so tired and weak and I didn’t even care that I’d peed my pants.
There were so many men and I didn’t know any of them. Some had police uniforms and others wore a shirt and tie. Some of them talked to the police lady quietly but none of them would look at me. They turned their faces away or pretended to read something on a clipboard. There was a big white sheet that someone was holding and I knew they were going to put it over Mum, but I didn’t want to see that. I didn’t want to see her disappear. I felt raw and cold—a back-door draught shooting up my back.
We went through the house and Margie was sitting at the kitchen table with a hand over her mouth. She reached out to me but accidentally knocked over her cold cup of tea.
I went in a police car. That is something I’d always wanted to do but it did not feel exciting. People in the street were staring at me. I could feel their eyes burning into the back of my head. I waited for Mum to walk into the living room but everything was already beginning to vanish. The last time she stood by the back steps to catch a break in the weather. The last time she sat on the couch and braided my hair while we watched Ghostbusters on TV. The last time she was in bed and let me lie next to her. When we were comrades against the world. So much emptiness it made me want to hide in the wardrobe and wait for the darkness that had taken her to take me too.
The police lady said that Pat was coming and she gave me lemonade, which was warm so I didn’t drink it. We just sat at the table and she kept asking me what had happened, but I didn’t open my mouth in case a scream came out and never stopped. Then Pat’s headlights flooded the room. My heart was beating so fast because I wanted him to help me, but I had broken Mum myself, and she had gone away from him too. I looked out the window and two policemen had to hold him back, trying to calm him down because he had a little pink bottle and said that everything was all right, that they were wrong, he had Mum’s favourite perfume and it was all okay now. The police didn’t know Mum and Pat had had a fight and he was trying to make it right again.
My gut sank like a stone in the river because I knew that Pat would punish me for this. If I had more discipline, I would not have looked away from Mum and let her fall. Nothing truer than that. So I ran into that wardrobe. Inside I listened to them all talking until there was nothing left to say and the police cars had gone and Pat had stopped walking back and forth over creaking floorboards and the night finally took the noise. But the dark did not take my pain or Pat’s. Only hid it until the morning came. You wake up with a start and remember what sleep had let you forget.
When I went to the loo early the next morning I watched Pat curled up on the couch holding the bottle of perfume he had bought Mum. Anais Anais. During the night his dreams had made him small. They don’t disappear you know; dreams and memories will float out of your head and go through other folk. And I walked right through one of Pat’s memories in that moment. He was sitting at the pokie machine, watching Mum behind the bar. Made a bet with himself that if triple cherries came up he’d ask her out. He can still see them falling into place: 1, 2, 3. The pokie machines are his kind of magic and they’ve brought her to him. He looks up, and Mum’s smiling. She already knows.
Back in the living room I can see Pat’s pillow wet with tears. I want to hold Pat and share my sadness, but if I wake him up, everything will break again. I saw a painting once in a gallery. Mum stared at it forever. A sheep is crying in the snow and her baby lamb is dead on the ground. No one can help her and she is alone.
5 Never-knowing
That morning Pat sat in the kitchen still as a statue. I hovered by the door but didn’t open my mouth in case I accidentally screamed just to break the silence. Then he shoved a chair out from the table.
‘Eat.’