Purple and pink dots: water boils faster in Colorado than in New York.
Big fat orange: four million people die every year from toxic water.
Soon enough those buttons make Joni go to sleep (except for big fat orange which he didn’t point to much) and I put my hand on his chest, let it rise up and down.
One day I tell William I want to go back into the mangroves where it had all gone so wrong. Maybe Mum had made it without me, I say. But when we walk down the path there are pieces of the boat everywhere, smashed, splintered, shattered.
‘I think...she’s wherever you choose her to be.’ William clasps his hands together and looks to the ground.
There is room for the sadness we feel. Might get smaller and lighter but it will always be there like a stain you wash and wash but can’t get out.
I don’t go to the mangroves after that. I follow William’s river instead. Down near the old convent where girls my age used to wash sheets all day because nuns said they’d done shameful things and had to clean out their soul. Down to the river that soaked up their sorrow and William’s all the same, ’cause it had seen him pray through my sickness. He said with all his tears it doubled in size. Just between you and me, I think William’s poetic licence is out of date. Rivers can only rise with water from the sky. And Mr Nancy the spider-man is in charge of that.
We still walk that river but not with words or wishes. We watch the birds call for one another. The snap of branches as they jump through bushes collecting sticks for their nests. The sound of someone close, unseen in the trees. We watch the sun retire for the night sending shadows soft and long across distant fields. I know in those moments we are both scared of things to come. But as that wolf of mine would say, there’s no point running from yourself ’cause wherever you go, there you are.
When he hears I am out of hospital Pat comes. He’s got himself a new job recycling cardboard boxes. Things can change just like that and become better than they were before.
I don’t know why but I stay in my room when William tells me he’s arrived. Even though I’ve changed my outfit and done my hair in a ponytail I need to change again. Green corduroy skirt and striped pink T-shirt. The ridges in the skirt go up and down and the T-shirt stripes across. My head is all cloudy and I feel colourblind. I creep out and stand in the hallway, watch as William shakes Pat’s hand and his head bobs a bit with all the mateness going on between them.
‘Cuppa tea?’
‘I’d murder a coldie.’
‘Right you are, long trip.’
And they both drink their beer straight from the bottle.
They look like one of those TV cop duos: one short and skinny and the other with a potbelly and bony fingers.
‘Aha!’
My stripey/ridgey camouflage fails and William spots me. I inch forward. The wall is cold on my back ’cause William’s had the air-con blasting all day. He’d rather be cool and broke than hot and rich.
‘G’day stranger.’ Pat stands up and holds out his hand. William says he has some more filing to do which is not true.
I run back into my bedroom. Joni’s disease must be contagious because I cannot speak.
After a while Pat knocks but doesn’t wait for an answer. Comes straight in. Rude.
‘How’s the head? William says you’re doing really well.’
‘Maybe I am, what’s it to you?’ I don’t know why I’m being so standoffish but everything feels starchy between us. Pat sits on the bed and talks about how he’s cleaned up his act, that he’s working for the Salvos with the boxes and they’ve got him in a program where people talk every week about their gambling. Got his fridge back too. He pauses to rub his neck, then says he’s moved into a nice two-bedroom flat and made up the spare just for me for when I visit. Put a Johnny Farnham poster on the wall. I didn’t tell Pat I already knew. That I visited him when I was asleep for all those months. Saw all the cleaning up and clearing out. Lying awake at night in cold sweats. Taking flowers to Mum’s grave. Even going to the library and listening to French language tapes. Bonjour, ça va toi? Ça va bien, toi? The burning shame as he hands his photo to the lady at the RSL club, anywhere that’s got a pokie machine: ‘I’m a recovering addict. Please do not let me enter.’ Taking the double shift every weekend just to keep temptation at bay. That he wanted only to love and be loved the right and honest way. And the only right thing to do was to look after me.
‘I talked to Mrs Whatsher…your teacher back home and she said there’s still a place for you there. Things could be like normal again.’
It sounds great because I miss my old friends, even Amanda Pearson who was never nice to me and talked through her nose like she was always whining. But when you get older you have to make tough life choices. Like how and where you choose to live it. So I put my quiet voice on and tell Pat I’d wanted the same thing too, but it couldn’t ever be that way. Pat had brought me to William who’d brought me to the hoatzin bird who’d brought me to Joni, and that’s where the journey ends. Can’t reverse time because everything that’s happened has changed who you are and what you know.
Pat’s shoulders slump and for a moment that movie The Wizard of Oz flicks into my head. Why the hell did that tin man want a heart? Didn’t he know that people can punch the love out of you, even if they don’t use their hands?
‘Oh. Righto. Yeah. You see, the thing is…’
What Pat wants to say is he didn’t know he needed me until I was gone. I know because that is the same way I feel about him. But you can’t be in two places at the same time.
‘Pat, I have to tell you something.’ I know it will come as a surprise but William said I couldn’t keep those big secrets anymore. ‘I’m a full half-black now. And it’s okay ’cause William’s put me back in the real world.’
I tell Pat I want to stay where I am so I can make tinned spaghetti jaffles with William and brush his hair with a special frizz comb because he says it feels like heaven. To dance up front when Jules plays at the pub first Sunday of the month. Draw animals on Joni’s back when he can’t get to sleep. I also have to stay in case somewhere along his own timeline Joni feels skin shame and looking at his reflection feels like stepping on shattered glass. I’ll try and suck his shame out like venom from a snakebite. I need to be here so I can remind him that we are fine, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.
When the Olympic Games are on, Joni and I sit on the couch and drink hot chocolate. William shows us when the athletes from Guyana came out. I cheer and whoop even though there are only five of them and they have never won anything except way back in 1980 when we got a bronze medal for boxing at the Moscow Olympics. I’m a lover not a fighter so am a bit disappointed to hear that. But you won’t believe this: that boxer’s name was Michael Anthony Parris—what are the chances?
I take Pat outside and down to the back gate. William and I had made a cross out of the boat wood, stuck it in the ground and put ferns all around the bottom because Mum always thought they looked exotic. I made a picture of us in the boat sailing across the sea and covered it in contact so it was waterproof. Then we stapled it to the cross.
Pat stares at the cross for a long time. I say he hasn’t lost me, that I will always be just down the phone. Pat says half the time it wasn’t him talking; it was his addiction that made him cranky and short-tempered, unable to listen and ask what I needed. But that he is practising to be better. I show him that splinter of wood from the boat, still stuck way down in my finger.