Machines for Feeling Read online

  A report from India reminds me of our newly blackened yard. An eighteen-year-old woman of high caste commits sati, throwing herself onto the funeral pyre of her husband to be burnt to death with his body. According to the report, life as a widow meant shaving her head, sleeping on the floor, wearing plain white and performing menial tasks. She was quite beautiful and a wife for scarcely a year. Some villagers thought she was forced to do it, fed with opium and coerced into the flames while others watched. Others said she was highly spiritual, had an otherworldly look as she stepped onto the cracking sticks beside the body of the man wrapped in soaking cloth. Some wanted to believe it was a pure sacrifice, that she was willing.

  I take notes in my scrapbook, glancing out the window every so often to check the stars are still hanging in that small square of sky and I write:

  A burning that is like falling – you look into the future at your white-robed scrubbing, you are young, you are leaking onto the floor that you scrub, leaking with an ardour that would see you die burning. You will make a beautiful spectre. Slow, black, crumpling of bone. Hair a wild bush aflame. When you are ash they will see you’re made of the same black frailty as your husband beside you. But they won’t be looking. They’ll be gazing at a white light in the sky. They have made you their saint and you’re not there to protest – you never were. They were always looking skyward when you walked by: the men sent their leers to the heavens, the women turned pious in your presence.

  Mark turns off the TV and tunes in the radio as I write. The table is strewn with bits of newsprint, a pot of glue which he has sniffed, and a pair of scissors. He settles on a news report. It’s eight o’clock and dim outside, despite daylight saving. He listens to the progress of the fires in the north. They’ve started moving people out of their homes and into two city hotels providing rooms at a small rate.

  ‘Maybe we could score a penthouse suite for a night. Pretend we’re fire victims and call up room service.’

  ‘We are fire victims.’ I pull my book away from his glances and cover it with my arm like I used to when doing tests in class. I glance outside where I can still make out the kidney-shaped scorchmark of his afternoon bonfire, then begin to write again.

  You know your desire would have burnt you away – you’ve no love for the bent sticks of women shuffling through the courtyards of town. No love for them at eighteen when all your muscles have a tender energy, expectant. You already have a knowledge of what it is to burn so you take your body down, salty with grief, take your steps with a knowing look and take your place (how could they protest) beside him. He stinks like he never did between your thighs, above you, below you, he stinks like you will stink if you scrub your life away, the trembling knees that held you above him collapsing onto a path of immaculate tiles. The fire is in me already, you say as the heat scorches your toes and you pass out in the stench and you think you hear the awe in the sudden shock of the crowd, in their collective unmoving noise as you fall onto the flames, but you’re not sure – it could be God it could be an angel of fire it could be the last gasp of desire snaking out of your throat …

  Mark reaches over the table and grabs the Clag glue, pokes his nose into the pot then sniffs loudly.

  ‘Uhu was better, but Perkins Paste was the best. I loved the way you could spread it.’

  He stands up and moves behind me while I write. I try to bat him away with my left hand but he dodges me then says in a high-pitched voice, ‘Oh baby, the fire is in me, I’m burning up.’

  My chair screeches as I move back to grab him but he falls suddenly silent and leaps toward the radio, turning up the volume.

  ‘St Mary’s Home for Children.’ The words make my stomach churn. A fire. One missing. No deaths or injuries, one asthma attack. Extensive damage to the hall. Something about destroyed artwork. We look at each other with knowing eyes, craning our heads toward the radio.

  ‘Arson,’ the reporter concludes.

  Mark reaches across the table and grips my clammy hand.

  ‘One missing,’ I say.

  ‘Could be anyone.’

  We sit staring at the radio and I wonder where he is now in the dark, his singed fingers, his waggling walk, that trusting nose to the air.

  Bird

  Rien’s more bird than girl these days.

  Bird-boned. Gets extra ruffled. That’s for sure. And so fragile – those wrists could be snapped in a tick. I could take care of some other limbs on her body. No trouble. The flying away’s what makes her bird. When I’m scared I stay still. Try to connect with something solid. But Rien starts flapping, running off.

  What the bird girl wants is the sky beneath her. She’s in love with emptiness and air.

  I wake her in the middle of the night ’cause she’s dreaming again of falling. Hold her tight till the sweat on her head has dried and she’s halfway back to sleep.

  In the morning she wakes still pissed about my fire. Thinks it was self-destruction. But no one got burnt. Thinks this ’cause if she tried to get rid of her ghosts she’d have to throw herself headlong into the flames. Like she wants to jump off rooftops, towers and landings. Sometimes she is like this. Bird girl – one hundred per cent.

  Burning’s not like cutting. Burning’s not about exterminating. Burning’s about transformation. Not good. Not bad. Just different. Burning is making something solid into smoke and dust, piles of ash. Jonas was the greatest firebug I’ve ever known. Got me started on the fire thing after I gave up some of my old living tools – what I needed in those pain days back at the Home. Diagrams, plans, charts. Wires, power-boards and systems. Machines mapped out on pages. There’s no use for them here so I sorted through them. And yesterday I set some of them alight. And I was laughing. It wasn’t a funeral. Just a dumb old bit of my life.

  It’s the first Monday in our new house and I sing in my best Johnny Cash drawl. Follow her round as she prepares for her day:

  ‘Rien you are

  a circuit breaker

  slipping your vanilla skin here and here

  between me and my machines between me and my lonely old electric whizzing heart

  split my flesh without a drop of blood

  heart converts to a flaming thing with no need for switches’

  I made it up specially, just for her. But d’you think she was listening? Not likely. Duck’s-back feathers – that’s what she’s got. All the smooth-said things slide right off. So I sing her a radio tune. Drum my hands on the wooden crates I scrounged for the kitchen table.

  And she goes, ‘I hate the easy listening channel, especially first thing in the morning.’ Ignore this is what I do.

  There’s nothing final about a fire. No escape from the past. Just a way to do something to it. I meditate, stare at the inside of each flame. The flickering transparent part right above the orange centre. Watch the smoke rise and linger. Each flame has a message, flares up with force. Then dies down to a cinder. The flame knows nothing about the rain that will destroy it.

  Last night she woke yelling about some scent-ghost she can’t get rid of. She’s smart enough to know it’s not real. It’s this that stops her doing the bird thing. But she’s scared that when she’s dead that smell’ll be there. A stuck shroud, suffocating.

  She’s experimented with other ways to get rid of it. The first time I saw her she was the skinny Wednesday orphan climbing out of the charity van. Dog Boy and I sat on the hall steps and watched the newcomers. ‘Anorexic,’ he said. Rien sent a scowl-face message to the Home supervisor who was greeting her with his fake father-hug.

  Me. I watched her closely. The way she was moving. Not like any machine boy. I reckon she’s the first person to give me the image for the word ‘grace’. It leaked from every pore in her body. Dressed from head to toe like some religious fanatic – in scarlet. I spent a lot of time thinking after that first glimpse. Weeks toiled by before I saw her again. They put her in the clinic ’cause she wouldn’t eat. A small girl. Waving around in that colour like a flag. A
nd I was thinking. Maybe I’m the bull that has to run at her.

  I had my own knowledge about disappearing. When I was little I tried to shrink. Climbed to the top of my mother’s cupboards with my wires. Plugged myself in and slept there in a space on the shelves. Small smell of mothballs and old wool. One word would stick in my head – jammed there like one of Mum’s songs when the record stopped whizzing round. I’d repeat it to put myself to sleep. Sound-spell that shuts out the rest of the world. Echolalia that’s called. Home doctors acted like my head was an empty cave that bounced back the sounds of others. Talked to me slow and stupid. Sometimes Father No. 3 would find me. Take a pillow. Press hard on my mouth, trying to stop the word. He’d forget that the mouth lets the breath go in and out. You try to tell him – ‘No, I can’t breathe like that, the word and the breath’s from the same hole.’ But the words get sucked into the pillow, phhhht. Mum’d pull him off. Or he’d lose balance on the shelves he’d climbed. I’d gasp for air, try not to make too much sound. ’Cause the word was wrong. And breath can be silent.

  Rien knows all about how it’s taken me this long to learn. To speak and to breathe. Sounds crazy but it seemed impossible. Especially the hard words. Rien taught me to say ‘I’ like I really mean it. Told me it used to sound like a gasp and splutter.

  After we left the Home Rien kept doing the bird thing. I didn’t mind sleeping rough, in the old car we found. Pretended I was on a journey, safe inside the metal skin. Watched the night world through the dirty windscreen. I even cleaned it once, so she’d have a better view. But she wouldn’t rest, went walking to nowhere places. That’s what she said when I asked. Nowhere. Scarier place than somewhere. Knew she’d end up perched way up high. So I began the search for a new home, something we could fix up and live in unnoticed.

  A nest is a refuge. A warm place that fits the shape of the bird. Somewhere to return. That’s what I kept in mind as I roamed the dirty suburb. St Mary’s shouldn’t have been called a Home. Kids were always escaping. Wasn’t a place you kept in your thoughts. Not like a warm stone in the palm on an icy day.

  Rien: ‘I want a house with no name, like that America song. I don’t want to live in a place called St Fucking Headshrink or Highgate Manor or Narnia or some such shit.’

  Me: ‘It was horse, not house,’ then I sang it to her.

  Rien: ‘Okay, okay, same difference.’

  Yeah that girl’s always gotta be right even when she knows she’s wrong.

  I tell her she had a misspelt youth. Call her Miss Information which she doesn’t mind. Thinks it’s a compliment. But I’m talking about her shonky facts. She’s got the knowledge that comes from a jagged lifetime, and from books and reading. A sort of watery way of knowing that goes under and over things.

  I found it first. Rickety. A falling-down porch, a brick wall along a shady alley covered with graffiti. Opened at the back onto a square patch of earth. Hills Hoist like a fairground ride in the middle. Old squat chimney I could climb up and sit by. Said to myself, this is the one. Faintest hope we could use the word and mean it here – home.

  Now I learn new words each day. Roll them round my mouth. Try them out on Rien whose lips make an O every time I string a sentence together. She’s not used to it. Before we met I was pretty much mute. Okay. My words won’t mend what’s broken inside her. So I’m working on a new song. My time will be chosen well. And her face will come alive like those few times early on. Rapture. I reckon that’s what’s gone missing.

  Rien.

  Wedge of light no machine can contain.

  Bird with sky caught under her wings.

  Welcome to Infinity!

  And love –

  open country, no borders.

  Scratchwork

  I wake to the sound of my new name. Whispered by an animal spirit in the whorl of my right ear. Running Wolf. A new smell hangs in the air. Tangy, the grass beneath my head sends out new shoots. My body shines with rain or dew. When I look at the drops making rivers on my skin, I think the sky has christened me in my sleep.

  The kids in the Home called me Dog Boy. They wouldn’t know the difference between a wolf and a hounded city dog. But names are important. Yeah, that’s right. Dogs are domestic animals, I know all about them. Lives spent at the whistle and call of a master. Wolves are wild. They will die when they’re cooped up and caged.

  Down the hill the smouldering’s stopped. But the clouds still look like bloody cotton wool. Yeah, heaven’s alight and ash is falling. Tiny flecks of soot on my arms and legs make dark streaks in the dew. I want to run down, circle the Home and survey my work. How much have I wrecked and ruined? Old dorm crumbled, the therapy room turned to cinders, the classrooms empty and black. I want to stand in the middle of the playground and yell.

  ‘Toast!’ Like Jonas would if he wasn’t in the ground. ‘You’re toast!’

  Some days are pure sound. Today I make a noise that shakes me like a choppy river running from the tip of my nose to this foot and that foot. Yeah, that’s right. A sound that trembles. Some days my jaw’s so clenched it sends a blue streak of pain up the left side of my head. I let the noise leak out. It leaves a thin metal taste in the back of my throat. It’s high sounding and strangled, half wolf-howl, half cat-in-a-fight. Today the dogs in the neighbourhood say hello for the first time. Send me their wails that they save mostly for sirens and slow days without a bone.

  Six years to the very day – the time I’ve spent in the Home. I know this because I’ve done the Scratchwork.

  I head downhill, rolling and running. The slope is steep and the grass and weeds bite the bare skin on my legs. The ground is wet and cool. I’m wearing the standard Home tracksuit that stinks of a hundred bodies. All the dead cells and sweat of the kids swished together in the laundry machines. That’s how you forget what’s yours and what belongs to someone else. The Home was a place of evil blending, so Jonas used to say, a cauldron of the bitterest ingredients, simmering, simmering. ‘Sooner or later this pot’s gonna boil right over.’ To my frown he’d reply:

  ‘That’s when we’ll spill out of the pot and escape, stupid,’ then he’d ghost-punch me in the belly.

  When I reach the flat ground I wipe myself down with my top then ditch the smelly rag down a drainpipe. I know they’ll be looking for a boy in blue. Yeah, that’s right. My clothes smell rotten like the middle of Jason Pierce’s farts. That kid used to catch them in a jar, letting them out into the classroom before the teacher walked in. Some of the kids said he lit the ’87 dormitory fire because he’d unscrewed the lid of a jar when Dave Johnson was just about to light a smoke. The flames came leaping out of Dave’s throat. Dragon they called him ever since. The truth about that fire was a secret kept fast between me and Jonas. Poor Jonas. The last time I saw his face like a moon surface cratered and lumpy, his eyes were bright with the light of flames, he held one finger close to his lips to shush my warning howls.

  I walk away from the hill toward the hum at the heart of the suburb, cross a highway, trucks and semis screaming past. Only green I can see is the distant hill I snoozed upon. I fling my head back, remembering the sky, but can’t see heaven for buildings.

  I spy the blue of a charity bin, stick my nose in and find a stink worse than the dorm toilet, damp and piss-reeking. Reach in for a handful of gear – a too-small t-shirt and a pair of black jeans. I stand behind the bin and climb into the new clothes. Check myself out in the window of a bookstore and see a mongrel face smiling back. I push down the stuck-up bit of hair and take another look. Practise my fearsome face and remember my new identity. Let out a snarl and show my broken teeth. Somewhere near there’s a train pulling in. I follow the noise to the station and buy a ticket. One stop to make before I meet my friends. The coins jingle in my bag where I emptied them the day before, pulling open my secret piggy bank and taking the stash out of the swine’s arse.

  I used to go out with the family dogs. Yeah, that’s right. Good times. I’d sit at the window of the car and fling
my head out, nose in the air, travelling a road lined with smell. A sharp sting in my nostrils when I breathed the clean scent of gum leaves, and a dull tongue-dirty taste from dust flung up from the spinning tyres. Now I put my head out the window of the train as it takes off with a grinding metal screech.

  ‘As long as you’re gonna act like an animal, you can go live with all the other ones.’ That’s what they said. Mum and Dad. Yeah, that’s right. So one morning after walking the dogs and poo scooping, they shoved me into the caged back of the station wagon. That day I thought I could smell the sea as they drove. A green, slaty whiff that made salt come out the tear holes of my eyes. Sat in dog fur scratching fleas till they dumped me at the gates of the Home. A sandstone prison with the name of a saint. St Mary’s.

  My last glimpse was Mum waving through the closed car window. Or maybe she was rubbing it clean of white morning fog, the four dogs peering back at me through the rear window, one paw pressed against the glass.

  I leak a small noise now as the train clatters past rubbish-filled backyards and factory chimneys. Wolfish. I look around at the human contents of the carriage, men with heads tucked into their papers. Kids jiggling their electric legs. A perfumed lady squinting at her nails. Another with her nose deep in a book. She looks up at me with a sudden smile. Yeah, that’s right. And I say to myself in rhythm with the train: Can’t touch me I’m not like you.

  Things went so quiet after they’d left. My two friends. If you count them on your fingers you’ll have lots of lonely fingers left. They fiddled in their loneliness and I bit their lonely nails down to the bleeding skin beneath.

  Mark and Rien. They were different from the other kids because of a small freshness. Maybe that’s love. A freshness on the turn though. And so they left.