I wanted to hate William, I really did. Spent a lot of time on it over the years. If one single person could be the whole reason why you got hurt and lost people and felt wrong about yourself, then maybe the world would make a little more sense. But it isn’t simple like that. And in the end it doesn’t take the pain away. I don’t want to be here, but I am also scared that one day I might wake up and find William gone. How can you explain that?
I looked at the faces in the choir. A few of them might have done bad things, been in jail even. But they could also make something beautiful together. William said very few of us are born with a halo or a red tail. We are all dancing up and down that ladder between heaven and hell. And then I know that William has come here to confess. Not to the man upstairs, but to me.
‘I lost connection. With myself, my God and most of all my family. I left when my kids needed me the most, and I’m ashamed about that,’ says William.
I tell William that Mama is connected to the land because everything of her, the bones, hair, teeth, even the last meal she ate, went into the ground.
He reaches out to touch my face, and I let him. We watch as the sun streams through the coloured windows and onto the pews. It’s times like this I want to believe in God, that he could talk to me through the light. That divine intervention was a real thing and I could be born again with a few drops of holy water.
‘I couldn’t do it, look after them on my own. Lot of guilt with that kind of…failing,’ William says with gravel in his voice.
How can the past be real if memories shift and change? I don’t know what made my dad the way he was. Maybe he had darkness in his mind, weighing him down heavy like stones. Maybe William broke his heart by leaving. Or maybe it was something else altogether.
‘Your dad, he didn’t belong to anywhere or anyone. He said it was my fault, and maybe he’s right about that.’
William’s words bounce around the room and make a pattern. Lines travelling through him and along my arms. Reaching up and over the ceiling.
‘But I want you to have a place. I want us to belong to each other.’ His hands reach out and take mine. They don’t feel as bony as they look. His skin is soft but those lines and patterns follow us out of the church and I’m worried it’s all going to turn into a terrible mess of regrets and wishes pulling us down to a place we do not want to go. Words are cheap. That’s what Margie used to say.
As soon as we get to the car William lights a cigarette. He leans against the bonnet and takes a long drag, trying to get as much smoke into his lungs as he can.
‘That stuff will kill you,’ I say.
He turns his head to the side and blows the smoke out, away from my face. ‘Damn straight.’
Back home I think it might be okay to put some of my dresses in the wardrobe. Delicate things can’t stay in a suitcase forever.
William sticks his head in through the open window. He’s been in the bungalow the whole day, but I don’t want to go back in there. I ruined it last time.
He’s got something for me. It’s a photo of Mum before I was born. She looks like a big little girl, smile so wide it could run off her face and skip down the street. And my dad is hugging her tight, their cheeks squished together. Next to them is William when his hair was twenty-three per cent less white than it is now. He’s standing just a bit to the side with his mouth wide open like someone told a joke just before the camera clicked and he’s thinking, ‘Geez, that was a good one!’ Now I’m smiling cause every inch of that photo is happy.
A billow of smoke whooshes into my room. It smells good. Someone’s cooking snags.
When everything is new the days are long. Time yawns and every hour slides gently into the next. After bangers and corn chargrilled on the barbeque, sleep crawls into William’s eyes. I tell him about the potato-rolling competitions back in Beyen and how kipflers are my least favourite for mash because it takes ages to peel the skins. He doesn’t want to talk anymore which is fine by me ’cause I’ve got other things to explain. Like water. How it makes life but can take it away too. All the animals that live in it, feed from it, all the people who are taken by the floods, storms and tsunamis when the water rises up, crashes down, rushes in and rages out. Or does not come at all for a very long time so there are cracks in the thirsty ground. Circles and cycles keep life going and we are cocooned inside whether we like it or not.
William’s got his eyes closed and says nothing. My heart sinks thinking all that knowledge has fallen on deaf ears. But then he nods his head.
‘You’re a good storyteller, my little channa.’
I don’t know what that is, but I’ve never been anyone’s channa before so I’ll take it as a compliment. With too much whisky.
I share a lot of stories with William over the next few days. Sometimes we are quiet together and that is all right too. When we are shelling peas for Friday night fritters, all you can hear is pop pop pop! Little peas tumbling into the bowl just like Mum and me used to do, and that was nice, finding a memory in something small and green. One night as I’m going to bed I tell William that I’ve got his eagle, and I hold out the drawing he did all those years ago for my dad. Feels wrong to keep it hidden at the bottom of my backpack.
William’s eyes are scanning it, and for a moment I think I’ve upset him again.
‘It’s not dirt,’ I say quietly, pointing at the smudges of Vegemite that still hold Dad’s fingerprints.
William squints closely, shaking the paper a little as recollection hits. ‘It was Marmite,’ he says. ‘Almost the same but a little sweeter. That’s what they had in Guyana when the Brits took over. Marmite, jaffa cakes and marching bands that played “God Save the Queen”, except on May 26th when they celebrated not having to sing that song at all.
‘That’s not an eagle. It’s a hoatzin. It’s got an unusual gut that makes food in its belly smell like sauerkraut, so it’s also called a stink-bird.’
It feels good to have made him happy.
‘How we goin’? he asks.
‘We goin’ all right.’
He nods and turns off the bedroom light, takes the drawing with him.
I listen as the wooden floorboards creak with his steps down the hallway, until he falls into his own bed and dreams deep. Faraway from being and knowing, until the morning light taps him on the shoulder and brings him into the world again.
25 Joni
Every good story needs a disaster and a reckoning somewhere along the way, and you can be sure that’s where we’re heading. The whole journey is starting to make sense, to me at least. I’ve been brought to William to learn about the hoatzin bird. It will lead me to the sea where a shell will lead me to Joni, and Joni will lead me to the boat.
It’s been two weeks since Pat left. I’m trying not to look back in anger because that can really damage your neck. Besides I’ve gritted my teeth long enough trying to really believe that ‘gratitude is the only attitude’. The lady down the street in Beyen with big boobs and a liking for tight skivvies had that sticker on the back of her Datsun 180B. As well as ‘Magic Happens’. I gave her the thumbs up whenever she drove by.
Maybe you have someone in your world so special you can’t imagine life without them. Well, that wasn’t the case with me and my cousin Joni. When he came to visit he always brought that raggedy soft toy called Augie Belle. It had been Jules’s when she was little. Maybe he hadn’t been washed since then ’cause it looked like a grubby grey rat. But that Joni boy held onto Augie Belle, rubbed its droopy ear over his own making that little lobe boing back and forth like a cat flap. He would ogle at me without blinking, not even once.