I look up at the ceiling and there are still wriggly brown water stains on the roof. That was one long bath.
‘You wouldn’t believe it but the bloke sitting next to this lady turns to her and says, “Yeah, and you still owe me a refill.” If it wasn’t our Tommy who’s sitting on the same bar stool a good fifty-something years later! With his port! I mean what are the chances?’
I thought about it for a while. I mean I really thought about it because this was a complicated one. ‘They are 22 and 30.’
She’s not bothered by my answer. She laughs with one big hoot. ‘If they didn’t go and buy him a two-litre bottle of port from behind the bar here! Can you imagine, all for our Tommy! Ah, dear, that was a day.’
An oven timer rings and she brings out a shepherd’s pie for Barney who’s a Vietnam Vet and thinks ASIO is microwaving his house. Just to be sure, he keeps his chickens in an underground coop. He pays for pub meals in eggs and lemons from the tree in his backyard. Now, I know all this but I don’t know Barney. Nevertheless he turns to me before leaving and says: ‘The tides don’t wait.’
Barney’s mouth was moving, but it was Mum who spoke.
‘Pay no mind and mind me language, but Barney’s still pissing out Agent Orange,’ says Brett’s wife, flicking pastry flakes off the counter.
Pat’s still busy with Brett so I’m hoping that Barney might let Mum talk to me a little more. But he’s already doing a U-turn in his battered old Kingswood by the time I make it outside. On the bottom step of the entrance hall a little girl’s playing with a slinky, scratching her head like a monkey with lice. She takes three jellybeans out of her pocket—two green and one black—and places them in the middle of her palm. Squints at me for a second then nods, so I sit on the step beside her. She slowly holds her hand out and I take a green one.
‘I don’t like the black ones either,’ she says.
We sit and suck on our jellybeans until they turn into clear blobs all slippery and flat. I am eyeing off her slinky because it is all the colours of the rainbow. She puts it on the top step and we watch it slink down over itself again and again. Every step a different colour.
‘Do you want to swap it for my rabbit?’ I think that is a reasonable transaction and her eyes open wide with excitement. So I take out the poor little bunny I’d been keeping in my backpack. Hold him by the scruff of the neck like mama animals do and he sways gently in the wind.
The girl pokes him with her finger and screams.
‘Ssshhh, he’s sleeping,’ I whisper.
Some people are scared of dead things and I understand the girl wants something in-between, either alive or a toy, but I didn’t have either. She runs back inside and gets Brett’s wife who is apparently also her granny.
I think she’s gonna blow her top but she just cocks her head to the side: ‘Well…it’s been a while between rabbit pies.’
16 Flutter by
My rabbit didn’t make it into a pie and I did not get the slinky.
Pat comes out to see what all the hoo-ha is about. He reels back when I open my backpack and I don’t blame him. Death smells if you don’t burn it or bury it. Pat says I can’t carry the rabbit round with me even if it had been an injustice. ‘Only thing you can do is write a letter to the department of…animal cruelty,’ he says. While we drive out of town Pat tells me to look out for a good place to bury it. I see a few along the way but I’m not ready to let go yet so don’t say anything. Doesn’t matter ’cause in the end that rabbit chooses his final resting place.
I tell Pat to pull over, and I get out and climb under a barbed-wire fence. Pat looks a little bit worried about it all but I just keep on walking ’cause this rabbit knows where it wants to go. Snap and crack stepping over old, bendy twigs. Bark peeling off ghost gums like wallpaper pulled halfway down. And then we stop. This is the place right in the middle of a circle of trees, happy to watch over him for all time. Pat gets on digging a hole. There is always a ‘sleeping shovel’ in the back of his ute in case he hits a roo and has to put it out of its misery. I stroke the rabbit a few more times. Leave lines in his fur with my fingers so he’ll know someone was with him. The wind changes direction and flickers along the dry grass up the hill, tells everyone to settle down and stay still. I lie the rabbit down and watch as Pat covers his body with dirt. Hovering above I’m like a clumsy ogre with long limbs.
Some people say that nothing is the opposite of everything, but I don’t think so. Nothing can be silence and light and that is worth a lot in a world full of angry noise. Space is nothing and everything at the same time. It’s where we came from and where we return. Soon big clumps of dirt cover the rabbit’s head and he’s gone, wrapped up in the earth.
‘Can he keep Mum company?’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘Maybe they’ll be looking for potatoes.’
‘Do rabbits eat potatoes?’
‘They eat whatever the good Lord provides.’
I don’t know if that is true. My rabbit could’ve been a fussy eater like Atticus Barnes who only ate devon and tomato-sauce sandwiches on white bread. Pat rummaged in his pocket and took out a clothes peg. It was yellow and faded, the plastic cracked in the middle. Sometimes Pat would do his washing at our house—when the repo man took his last washer away he did it all the time. When he hung out a load he’d always have pegs sticking out of his mouth. Sometimes when I was in his good books Pat would take the last peg and chase me round the garden, snapping it like a crazy duck. I always told him to stop even though I didn’t mean it. He looks at me now and snaps the peg. We run and run like that paddock is the back garden stretching on forever and teatime is a long way off.
Pat pretends he has a lame leg so I can beat him but then he speeds up and runs past me.
‘Oldest trick in the book, ya daft chook!’
I think I’ll show him so I run off in the other direction. Back through the gum trees and the tall grass swooshing this way and that. I can feel her warm hand on my back and I know that when I get to the other side of the trees I’ll find water. So sure that Mum will look after me. I close my eyes. Just walk through the bush until the dam is right in front of me. Having water is a human right so no one can stop me from swimming in it.
‘Dylan, Dylan!’
I strip down to my crop top and undies. Wading in I feel mud slide between my toes. It’s slippery and cold. After being cooped up in a car for the past few days this feels like heaven.
‘DYLAN!!!!’ Pat’s still a long way off. He’s screaming now.
I paddle out and duck under. The water’s happy to see me too, humming deep like a purple and burnt-orange note together—what a beautiful harmony those two make. I swim under all the way to the other side. When I come up a crow’s wings flap overhead heavy in flight. She’s gliding away from the sun, scared the heat will melt her beak clean off.
Wing shadows pass over Pat who’s standing on the edge of the dam. ‘What the bloody hell are you doing? You just pissed off! Again!!!!’
‘I could hear the water.’
‘You can’t hear a dam.’
‘Yes you can. If you listen loudly.’