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  Father man saw my brother asleep on the bread through the kitchen window. He went to the workshop. He fetched the pincers from the shadow board. He took off his boots at the back door so as not to make a sound. He crept up behind my brother. Father man opened the pincers but they were too small. The shape they made was oval. My brother’s neck is round. My brother’s neck is a soft boy’s neck; his man apple hasn’t come up yet in the front.

  Pincers are for working with nails and any sorts of metals that stick and pluck and pull. Crabs and scorpions can inject venom during a pincer strike. Father man hooked my brother up by the neck. The bread came with him, I think because his saliva was on it. The frame of the bread was stiff but the white within it was soggy. It made a hole, easily, for the cry to get through.

  My mother rushed in. There was shrieking and the pincers were put in a drawer. Kitchen tools are called utensils, small tools suitable for women. The pincers lay next to the scissors, side by side, in the kitchen drawer.

  Afterwards father man had his shower. He took his outside work socks off and put his inside rubber thongs on. He fetched the key and locked the locks.

  Another option at night, if there’s no sleep, is to lie in bed and do some engine breathing. Starting at rest, then the cough of first ignition. Cold early combustion, cloudiness in the chest as the oil stretches and heats. Once the motor is ticking smoothly I move up the gears and down again. The throat grasps the changes. The mattress is a soft road beneath the breathing engine. It allows the shudders of the motor to enter but it doesn’t pass them on. Later in the night I put the engine under load – a hill at first, increasing in steepness, then a trailer, increasing in weight. In the dark there is a tug of war between the dead weight of the load and the power of the engine. There is no shame in losing. Any engine, any body, can be outmatched. It goes on until the breath is broken, my pillow is wet and the day birds start to sing.

  The next day is a Sunday and it is hot again. People are coming outside and then not being able to decide if they want to be outside, so they go inside again. People are coming outside and then going inside again like dogs.

  In the glove box of the Holden there is a photograph of father man. Something is wrong with father man’s body. He is younger in the photograph. He is barely a full man yet. Here he is standing next to a pockmarked termite mound in a field of pockmarked termite mounds. The red dirt from the mound is smudged on his shorts and his t-shirt. The air around him is smudged and gingery too. There are his hands, hanging from his wrists, hanging from his arms, hanging from his shoulders. Have I ever seen father man without a tool in his hands? What did he believe in back then? There’s a green can of course. A perfect fit for the palm. Father man’s thumb and forefinger nearly meet, in a pincer grip, around the shiny green can.

  When father man was a baby he was brought home from hospital on the bus. There was no car then and no shoes. There were cigarettes and a tractor for tending the paddocks around the fruit trees. Father man didn’t say when he got prickles in his square boy’s feet. He had some cut-down tools but he didn’t have words or songs. His dad gave him a cigarette for his birthday. He might have been five. He might have been nine when the first car came but I imagine he always knew how to press his lips together wetly to make the sound of a motor, always knew how to hold his spittle to mimic the dead place in the gearbox between the gears. When his infant teeth rotted and ached father man drove himself to sleep. He knitted the car, the camber of the road, the cadences of the motor in a side pocket of his cheek that didn’t hurt. He always put the tools back on the shadow board after he had used them.

  The thing I really know is that father man dropped a hammer on his bare five-year-old foot. Three toes broke and the nails greyed and died. His mother heated a darning needle to pierce the nails and release the black blood behind them. Father man took the hot needle between his own boy’s fingers and went out under the fig tree and did it to himself. It’s a choice to hurt yourself before someone else gets a chance.

  If you decide to go to school, a Monday can be good. People might not remember that you weren’t there on the Friday because they have been having happy times with their families on the weekend. On a Monday the teacher won’t ask you a question because they’re sunburnt from playing veterans’ cricket and they always start the class by asking the boys about their kicks and hits and runs. Recess is just two laps of slow walking around the quadrangle. Lunch is twelve. When the bell goes for lining up you can take your place. You can be close to someone behind you and close to someone in front of you. They might not like it but there’s punishment for talking so they can’t say, and that’s fine by me.

  There are many happy times in my family. The happiest time is when my mother loses a contact lens. She calls us to her and we drop to our knees and pat the floor at her feet. It mainly happens in the bathroom, so she’s wearing her slippers or her feet are bare on the brown tiles. She doesn’t move for fear of stepping on the lens but she calls down instructions telling us where she thinks we should look. Once I found the lens on the leg of her bell-bottoms, just under her knee where the fabric skirts out. A tiny glass cup stuck to the blue denim. I picked it off and put it in my mouth.

  The thing that happened at school last year was a teacher became in love with a year nine girl. After a while the girl got a boyfriend, a boy from her own class at school, so she told the teacher that she wasn’t going around with him anymore. On the weekend the teacher took fourteen fishing hooks from his tackle box and swallowed them, and then he called the ambulance. He’s back at school this year. The scar on his throat where they cut him open starts at the top button of his short-sleeved business shirt and goes downwards. The girl isn’t at school now, but when it happened she was fourteen years old.

  Some cars come back to the workshop because they are weak and have broken down. Some cars come back because father man has failed to help them, or in helping them he has accidentally caused another part to fail. Some cars come back because of me. Darren’s white Valiant is towed up the driveway on its rear wheels by a tow truck. The car has an unhappy, shameful feeling – a dog being dragged home after running off. The tow truck driver hands father man a clipboard from the cab – there’s something for him to sign – then the driver reverses the winch and the front of the Valiant is lowered to the ground. The big white car sits under the pine trees. The big white car brought to silence so easily. A handful of my mother’s sewing needles dropped into the carburettor, through the damper cap.

  Tonight my mother is reading Tangled Shadows. Before that it was Sweet Compulsion; before that it was Lure of Eagles. Each book takes three days. She writes the titles down in a notebook in her red handbag so she doesn’t get the same book from the library and read it twice. My mother is reading The Tempestuous Flame, The Vital Spark, The Joyous Adventure, Stranger on the Beach and A Very Special Man. My mother is full of romance. She carries it with her wherever she goes.

  Christmas is just around the corner now. What is fancy on Christmas Day is when you take a watermelon and cut it in half and scrape out all of the flesh with a spoon to make it into a bowl. Then you fill it up with other fruit – grapes, bits of oranges and apples, some plums and tinned peaches. There is ice cream or cream with that.

  What is also fancy at Christmas time is to have decorations. All the fathers in Australia hang strings of coloured lights – sometimes blinking lights. The father checks all the tiny bulbs and untangles all the lines. He doesn’t like doing it but he does it all the same. The lights go up every year before Christmas and come down again afterwards.

  It’s Saturday again and I’m going Christmas shopping. Do I tell the bus driver that the white smoke coming out of the exhaust of his bus is a symptom of head gasket failure? Do I tell him that a poorly sealing rocker cover gasket will piss oil all over his engine? It’s the big-belly bus driver again. He looks like he’s rolled a rock into place above his dick.

  ‘Must remember to buy coffee,’ I say under
my breath as I walk down the aisle of the bus. I don’t drink coffee but it’s something I mumble to myself. I got it from TV.

  Sharon gets on the bus at her stop down the hill. She sits next to me because we’re not at school so nobody can see. Sharon tells me that the boy that did the petrol at the local petrol station is now a tyre-fitting apprentice at the automotive next door. The boy gets four dollars for each tyre so every day he can buy Fanta and smokes. I’ve seen that boy – he wears Amco jeans and a silver chain around his neck. The tyre black is blackest around his fingernails, then grey across his knuckles. The boy is really just a child. Sharon says she milks him on the spare parts bench. She doesn’t let him touch her because the tyre black might come off on her and she has good clothes now that she got from her mother’s new boyfriend for her birthday.

  The bus stops on the highway opposite the automotive. Sharon stands up and slides the top window of the bus open and puts out her hand and waves at the roller door across the road. The tyre boy is sitting on a milk crate in the sun in his black jeans with his black fingers around a smoke. He holds the smoke in the male way with his fingers curved around the top of it as if he’s putting a hose to his mouth to drink. Females hold the smoke between two fingertips so it looks like they’re blowing a kiss when they drag. I’ve practised this with a twig so when the time comes I’ll know how to do it right.

  The boy’s arms are still thin. The chain with the key has gone inside his singlet between his nipples where there isn’t any hair. Sharon doesn’t mind that he hasn’t grown into a man yet. He doesn’t look up when Sharon calls and waves. The boy is all there is and Sharon is fine about taking it.

  Three seats in front of Sharon and me, a man and a woman are sitting on the bus together. The man reaches behind the woman and puts his hand under her hair and strokes the warm part at the back of the woman’s neck. His hand is hidden beneath her hair but I know it is there. She isn’t a girl. Her hair is old. I can see the backs of their heads and I can see the side of the man’s face. His nostril is curved up so the veiny red skin inside his nose is on show. It’s revolting, but perhaps the woman has gotten used to that? When people become adults they can get used to anything.

  Everybody knows that they want to touch you at the start. They like to go swimming with you. They like it when you’re wet. They like it when you laugh, but not so much they can see the inside of your mouth. Hair hanging down your back is good. What I don’t know is how you make them keep wanting to touch you. It’s the first time I’ve seen it. I want to ask the woman on the bus the thing she has that is special because it doesn’t show. What I need is for someone to tell this to my mother.

  Sharon has bubblegum but she doesn’t offer it. Just before we get off the bus I hold a plastic bag in front of her so she can change into her mother’s new t-shirt because it is pink and has a low v-neck.

  At the pharmacy there’s a plastic stand of eye shadows to steal and there’s a pencil for drawing a line around your lips and eyes. It’s the same idea as at primary school – a decorative border to draw attention. Even if you do bad work in English or social studies the teacher will give you extra marks for the border.

  Females aren’t born with the lines drawn in. The rim of the eyes, the edges of the lips – the soft openings for crying and spitting – have to be outlined with a special pencil. There’s an everyday size and a mini for the purse. When a male sees the lines they keep him up close. They keep him focused on the wet places of the face so he doesn’t notice the female’s outer edges and can’t tell if she is made badly, or too young or too fat. Treat yourself with Revlon. Do they mean like medicine, or like on your birthday when you are meant to get cake? After you’ve treated yourself and it’s in your pocket or your schoolbag the stealing makes your thighs swell and fill the tubes of your jeans. Even if you walk out carefully, one denim thigh rubs roundly against the other. It’s best to tie your spray jacket around your waist, even in the summer. If you get caught you can say you didn’t do it. What you say will come out of your drawn-around mouth so they might not listen; they might just watch the edges of it and see how it moves.

  I take a bottle of my mother’s perfume from the pharmacy. Every mother should smell nice. My mother wears the same perfume as she did in the time before, but perhaps it doesn’t matter. The ad for Tweed says it is a woman’s finishing touch. The perfume bottle is opaque. It has no gauge. It isn’t like a petrol tank. You don’t know it’s empty until you spray the last spray. Back at home I replace the old bottle of perfume with the new. I like to take care of my mother. I like her to have the things a woman has. I like to keep her safe.

  No one is home when I get back and there’s time in the afternoon to bury the old bottle of perfume under the lemon tree in the front garden. I dig a deep hole with a trowel. I scoop out the dry orange stones on the top and the moist orange stones underneath. I put the perfume bottle at the bottom of the hole and I put the pincers in too.

  The first time father man came for dinner my mother toothpicked a circle of pineapple to the top of the ham steaks, each toothpick crowned with half a red cherry on its tip. My mother wore lipstick. She told father man all about her job and she didn’t have her Mills & Boon open on the table.

  Just the round slab of ham at dinnertime tonight. My mother’s mouth opens. She closes it. Tomato sauce helps with getting meat down. It’s sad when adults stop wanting sweet foods.

  The cricket is on the television. In between overs father man asks me what I want for Christmas. He is cutting his ham steak into a grid of equal forkfuls. Father man flicks his eyes from the television to me. He asks me again what I want for Christmas. The hot room. The pink meat. A fly whining at the window. He asks me again what I want for Christmas, but this time he says girl.

  My mother is looking at me. I can feel the hard corners of her smile. There are no words inside me. I couldn’t make them if I wanted to. Father man puts his knife and fork down. He gets up from the table. He goes to the kitchen drawer and takes out the scissors. Father man’s face is blazing. I can hear him counting under his breath. He stands behind me. He grips my ponytail hard in his hand. He cuts off my hair.

  My mother’s shrieking was a kind of language. If she had kept shrieking I think I could have worked out what she was saying; I think I could have joined in. We might have had a conversation. But she stopped. She used her hand to stroke her own hair back behind her ear, then she put the ponytail in the kitchen bin.

  After dinner I go to bed and read the newspaper. Another death for Ford today. A tussle between a car and a truck on the highway. The truck ended up in the arrester bed, but not before it ran over the Ford. The death count is just for today. Tomorrow it will revert to zero.

  The night is warm and still, good for driving. I peel back the flyscreen and climb out onto the verandah. Babette is curled up, asleep, on my brother’s schoolbag. She doesn’t look up. A few steps across the dry lawn, then the dead needles beneath the pine trees. There’s a Falcon in for service but tonight I want to drive father man’s car. The door is open, the key a lump under the rubber mat. A Holden is something to be proud of. Holden is a family business that started out making saddles for horses, then they made motorbikes, then great Australian cars.

  I like driving in the dark. If father man looked at the gravel in the morning he would see where the tyres of the cars turned in the night. He would see their slithered tracks like fat snakes winding down the driveway. The cars are happy not to have their lights switched on. They like to use my eyes. The slope down the driveway is steep enough for a family sedan to start rolling but sometimes I have to put my leg out and push along the ground to get first traction. The front tyres hold their breath, then tip into a forward roll. I can feel the exact moment when the tyres decide to shoulder the weight. Close the door gently. Sit tall as the car glides past the dark house as if it is a room that has broken free and is sliding slyly away from the others. It’s safe to start the motor on the road after the bus stop. Ev
en on a still night the sound barely carries and who’s to say, anyway, what car this is on the road, and who is driving it? It’s safe to drive up the driveway on the way home as by then the engine is warm and smooth. The seatbelt droops over my shoulder, slack across my lap. Brake for the stop sign on the highway. There’s a streetlight above it. This is a place. We are in a place now – not pushing a car shape out of the night, but arriving somewhere. Dirty light seeps through the windscreen. The light makes it hard to look out from inside yourself; it makes you see a scene like others do – the Holden nudged against the line, waiting to turn, the girl on the seat with a spray jacket over her pyjamas. I should have brushed my new short hair. I don’t want to look unusual, like I’m the story instead of the car. My face is small but there’s no one on the seat next to me to compare it to. Check for oncoming traffic. Accelerator, clutch, into second, then smoothly into third. The car picking up speed, the car taking speed from the road, the car stretching out underneath me, stretching like a big cat as it runs the outside lane. All that speed waiting for its opening – the drive shaft powers the axles, the car’s ribs accordioned inside its body, hungry for the pedal. Drop your elbows. Drive.

  I glance across at the passenger’s seat. I imagine I am taking my mother somewhere. I imagine I am driving her away. My mother is not a natural driver. She is separate from the car, adjusting it, nervous at what it might do. Like father man, I can operate all of the car’s controls without the words for how it is done travelling across my mind. My skin expands to take in the outer casing of the car. When I tap the dip switch so as not to blind an oncoming vehicle I can feel my eyelids closing around the headlights. I haven’t made too many mistakes, although the first time I went night driving in this car, father man’s car, I left the handbrake on and drove for nearly an hour with the vehicle in this unhappy condition.