When you forget you’re grieving, laughter is a guilty treat. Soon enough Pat packs his smile away in its box. Can’t tell what, but there’s something else he’s feeling guilty about too.
Wanteegi, now that’s a strange place. So much dust it bleeds out the soles of people’s skin leaving red footprints all over town. The men are tall and skinny and the women short and fat—like some kind of genetic rule. The kids? They were just plain weird—caught somewhere between the short and tall of their folks. Nothing much grows here on account of the dust, so people only eat veggies from a tin with steak done one of three ways. Rare, rarer and still beating. Worse still, I reckon all that tin-can metal has been seeping into their brains, tampering with neurons. At the Watering Hole Hotel the barmaid plonks a lemonade down in front of me. Gritty eyes and fidgety lips. Hair last washed a couple of weeks ago.
‘We run out of them plastic monkeys.’
Which was okay by me. ‘There’s too much plastic in the world and it’s choking the seals. Sometimes they wash up on the beach wearing the necklace of death,’ I say.
‘We ain’t nowhere near the sea. So don’t you worry about that.’ She has a rotten tooth up front and her fingertips are stained yellow. Pat comes over and points at the pokies.
‘How long they been here?’
‘Few weeks.’
‘Which one’s put out the most?’
‘You gonna take number four out for Chinese or somethink?’
She pulls up her bra strap up and starts stacking glasses. Pat smiles at her but not in a nice way. He heads over to Ted the publican whose real name is Edward but no one calls him that except his mother and she is dead too. I check the cardboard-cutout man is in optimal viewing position. Even though he had eyes, he couldn’t really see so I get a green pencil from my backpack and poke looking holes through—now I’m incognito. By the look on Ted’s face, Pat had stuffed something up again but this time it couldn’t be my fault. I hadn’t touched his phone since I got on that bus with all the Yankee grannies.
‘But I ordered 370 of the lager. You’ll have to take it back.’
‘That’s 40 cents off a unit, off your package rate if—’
‘Who’s drinking that here? Couldn’t give it away.’
Ted does a double take and squints in my direction.
Cover blown, abort mission.
Pat storms over and talks real quiet like he’s telling me a secret, except he’s real mad. That’s what adults do when they want to shout but have to show some restraint.
‘Go outside and pretend you’re a statue. One that doesn’t move.’
That didn’t make any sense, but I stop myself from saying so and finish my lemonade. The barmaid pays no attention. Margie would have called her a floosie shantoosie. But I felt sorry for her. Somehow I knew that inside her lungs something was growing. One day she’d go to the hospital for her hacking cough and never leave.
13 Broken bottles
Out the back of the pub I hear a ratbag boy jeering, and even before I turn the corner I know he’s a prime example of Wanteegi’s genetic misfits. Squished nose, freckled face, squinty eyes and a front lip curled up on the right like he got nipped by a fishhook. Old-man knobbly knees and untied shoelaces. Ripped T-shirt and ears so full of dirt you could grow potatoes. There are three of them and this Mr Freckle-face is in charge. His brother wears a permanent scowl on account of his forehead that juts out like a cliff edge. The last one is a hanger-onna. They call him Dagbum and he can’t be much more than four. He just stares at me and keeps playing with his willy like he needs to go to the toilet.
Freckle-face tells Scowler to put all these glass bottles up on the wooden fence posts so he can shoot them down with a slingshot. He isn’t very good. Heaps of stones just zoom past. Then one hits the middle bottle and it explodes. I watch as all the pieces shatter into tiny glass diamonds. For a moment it looks like a crystal ball floating in mid-air and it’s beautiful. But a split second later those pieces are falling. The bottle can never be fixed and made useful again and that is the same as not being alive. I run over and count all the pieces of glass. There are sixty-eight, which makes me sad because that is a whole number and it very much wasn’t. Then Freckle-face tells me to rack off, that I shouldn’t be there. I tell him what I think about this disgraceful waste but he just laughs and says they were meant to be broken so I can piss off now and let him get back to it. I’m scared all right, but my feet sink a little deeper into the dirt. Some things are worth holding your ground for.
Freckle-face starts up with the slingshot again and another bottle explodes right near my head. A shard of glass actually goes into my hair. I found it that night in the shower when it pricked my finger. He aims another one at me but it goes straight past and hits a rabbit that was running away. It’s motion less. I saw that one other time with a myna bird. He was hopping up and down on a brick wall at school then just fell off. Died in the one moment I’d been watching him. Does the rabbit feel that split second when life and death run into each other?
I crouch next to it, perfectly soft and warm. I’m dizzy and I close my eyes, but then I’m back in the tree and Mum’s falling forever.
Which world am I in; is this real? Am I a real girl?
There’s a volcano stirring inside and my blackness is rising to the surface, too late to stop it. I run over to the bottles and smash every single one. Slam them into each other until there’s a giant puddle of glittering glass, a mirage of sparkling splinters. Nothing pretty about it. Nothing at all.
Before I can do anything else Freckle-face whispers in Scowler’s ear. He comes running over and pulls my hair so hard I fall over backwards. Kicks me in the guts and I curl into myself like an echidna. Then everything’s dark. But I hear Freckle-face egging him on.
‘Harder!’
Scowler doesn’t say anything and I think maybe he’s thought better of it. But then there’s a boot in my back and my spine’s burning. Again and again. I peek through my fingers and look up at him. His face is blank but tears are running down his cheeks. The little one comes over and stares at me.
‘Dirty.’
He wasn’t talking about the muck in my hair or the dust choking me in the throat. But I am not the colour he thinks I am. I am not black. I’m invisible, like water. Freckle-face comes over and spits in my eyes.
‘Piss off, you ugly cunt.’
That word cuts right through me and out the other side. Pierces my chest and lets all the air out. I’m suffocating and want the ground to take me now.
‘Fuck off, the lotta-ya!’
Pat marches over arms flapping and feet pounding. Before they know what’s what he’s yanking them off me and up into the air. Freckle-face falls to the ground, but he’s not afraid.
‘She broke all the bottles!’
‘And what were you doing, then? Fuck off! GAWN!’
They scramble to their feet and around the back of the pub, cut across the laneway opposite and behind a row of houses. As the dust settles Pat looks down and I’m sure he’s about to throw me through the air too.
‘You gonna crawl into a ball every time ya get in trouble?’
‘It was running, just running, that’s all.’ I point to the dead rabbit on the ground.