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‘I gotta…shake the snake,’ Pat says and pulls over. I watch as he slides down the embankment like he’s being swallowed by quicksand. There’s nothing in the car to eat except a bag of jubes. I pick all the yellow ones out and throw them into my mouth. The jelly sinks into the ridges of my back teeth and my tongue flicks them out again. I watch the gum trees watching me and wonder if they know of Barry back home. When all the noise got too much like Dad screaming and throwing things, Mum would say ‘Go visit Barry,’ and I’d run down to the paddock at the bottom of Novis Lane where that big old gum tree stood. Ran so hard I’d be bent over when I got there, lungs sucking in more air than they could let out. Tall dry grass tickling the hairs on my legs. I’d climb into the cave in the base of Barry’s trunk.
Once when I was hiding inside Barry, I found myself in one of Dad’s old memories. My grandmother is crying and little-boy Dad wants to help but doesn’t know how. He watches as the pills fall like rainbow candy into her hand. When she stops crying and lies down on the bed, he stays with her for the rest of the day. Stroking her hair. Holding her hand. Until his older sister comes home from school. She pulls him off the bed; tells him to let Mama sleep. They want to pretend for as long as possible that she might wake up. And he will always remember looking back at his mama before the door closes, the palm of one hand turned upwards. Her fingers spread out delicately like a fan calling him back with a silent request: ‘Wait, don’t go.’
I knew that moment. I knew that hand. You are never further away from yourself than when your mama has gone. Dead mothers are the worst legacy of all. But you cannot keep that pain in your fists and take it out on other people. Sometimes when I curled up inside Barry I thought of being a cicada in the ground. I’m not alive yet and all I can do is wait until it’s time to dig my way up to the surface. All the noises are covered in a blanket of dirt and have no sharp edges at all. Inside Barry, time is always somewhere else and I don’t remember how long I’ve been there until Mum comes and finds me. She tries to hide the bruises but her smile is always a bit broken. I just hold her hand and walk extra slow through the paddocks because I want this to be forever, just the two of us.
Out here with Pat in the middle of nowhere, I wonder if all these other gum trees are safekeeping secrets too. Maybe there are stories deep down inside the roots or buried between layers of bark. Like the letters I hid inside Barry. I didn’t write them and they weren’t written for me. But I reckon when Dad left for good, he hoped I would find them all the same. Men always keep things they reckon will come in handy down the track. But that track is long and full of spare parts collecting not much more than dust. Dad was like Pat that way. The shed out back was full of junk from his hard-rubbish runs. Before the council truck chugged around town he would cruise the streets looking for treasure. Said people chucked good things out so they had an excuse to buy something shiny and new. I often hid in that shed, playing hide and seek with Mum.
One day I hid behind the bonnet of an old rusted Holden ute propped up against the back wall. Maybe it had been there when we moved in; I can’t remember. Underneath was a metal cabinet. And inside the middle draw was a shoebox stuffed with letters. ‘From Michael’ was scrawled in kid writing at the bottom of every single one. That’s my dad’s name. I stayed crouched behind the bonnet and read those letters over and over again. Forgot about the game I’d been playing, until I heard Mum screaming my name. Then my heart beat me back into the real world. Shoved the letters into my sock and stumbled out of the shed. Mum was mad as hell; thought someone had stolen me away. The next morning I ran straight down to Barry and hid those letters, carved out a slit in his trunk just wide enough to shove them inside. A bark pocket for past wishes and woes.
Pat’s taking his sweet time shaking the snake, so I slide my fingers into the bottom of my backpack and pull that stash of letters out. I’d marked them all with numbers so I could keep the story in the right order, but in the end it didn’t seem to matter. Dad’s trying his best to stay on the lines but his thoughts travel faster than his hand can scribble. He asks, ‘Are you coming back? Do you still love me?’ He wonders how it is possible to walk home from school one day and find every single piece of his father gone. No coat on the hook or whistle in the hallway. Just footprints leading out the door—to where, why, how?
He’s too scared to send those words in case the answer, the only answer, is ‘No’. So he writes the same letter over and over again. But without an answer, questions buzz around his head like TV static. Finally the noise ignites a volcano in his mind and it grows and grows as he does, from a lonely little boy into a man who likes to be alone. A man who hurts other people like he wanted to hurt his dad. Finally he leaves his family too. How could he not? It was in his genes. I trace the words on the page with my fingers; the question mark is like a snake with a full stop at the bottom. If you asked, I’d still say I don’t know why I keep those letters so long past their due date. But the wolf inside would shake his head and call me a liar. He knows as well as I do they need to be delivered, one way or another.
Sitting here in the hot car my mind’s playing silly buggers. Maybe there are real snakes out there and Pat’s been bitten by a black one with a red belly. Maybe that snake is coming for me. I’ve left all the car doors wide open, so I close them again, catching my little finger in the last one as I slam it shut. Throbbing like a drum it feels like it’s gone puffed up triple size, even though it looks the same. I scream blue murder and Pat comes stumbling over the dunes, pants halfway down his legs. A thin line of blood runs across the inside of my nail.
Now a scratch is okay—you’ve got enough time to tell the blood to go back the way it came. But if I get cut from a tin lid or a blood vessel bursts ’cause I blew my nose too hard then there’s no telling what might happen. Maybe I’d go all haemophiliac and keel over right there. And even though it is right and normal to have your ‘little friend’ visit every month, a period is not friendly and when it finally comes it could be the end of me if the bloody tap isn’t turned off in time. Besides, there’s magic water in your blood that keeps you alive. If it leaks out, you’re very quickly not.
‘What the hell are you screechin’ about?’ Pat’s furrowed brow is all shiny with sweat, bulging on his forehead like a fleshy avalanche. No one’s pretty when they’re cross. He looks at my finger.
‘You’re not bloody Rasputin all right, you’re not gonna die. It’s not even on the surface!’
I still get the first-aid kit out and plaster my finger with three bandaids so I don’t have to see the blood under my nail. I try to stretch out those creases on Pat’s forehead with my good hand, but he just slaps it away.
‘Just lay off, all right! You’re drivin’ me round the bend!’
‘I’m not driving anywhere! It’s not my fault you’ve got a weak bladder!’
He starts the car up, clears his throat like he’s coughing up half a lung and we hit the road again.
‘Rasputin never had no problems with his blood. It was that boy prince,’ I tell Pat just to set the record straight.
He sniffs through his nose and I squish a smile between my lips. Cat-bum style.