Machines for Feeling Read online

  ‘You’ve got the gift of the gab, Mai, you know that, don’t you. Poked! You’re a truly graceful orator,’ Delilah stands with her hands on her hips. Mai looks at Delilah.

  ‘What’s your prob, Del?’

  ‘You’re going to use this stuff, hon?’ Delilah raises one sculpted eyebrow at Rien. ‘It’s going to be … that kind of a book – full of sex and death and the evil eye?’

  ‘You gotta give people what they want. You gotta have all of that in there to make them read it, a bit of love, a bit of death, a bit of evil. It’s gotta be like life, eh Rien?’

  Rien shrugs and asks Mai if she thinks finding dead baby birds is an ominous sign. She tells the story of the chicks at the Home, of the lie she was forced to tell Dog Boy about Madonna’s unfortunate death.

  ‘What happened to this God Boy then, is he still there?’ Delilah asks through a veil of wet hair which she has slung over her face, head bent, in order to dry it more thoroughly.

  Rien tells them of the newspaper reports on the fire and Dog Boy’s disappearance. Delilah shakes her head, expressing concern or perhaps in an effort to dry her hair. It’s D-o-g, not G-o-d, Rien adds, then explains the origins of his name via the same amateur case-history that had circulated amongst the children at the Home. Dog Boy had no siblings but was raised instead with dogs. In the first three years of his life, it was rumoured, he did not speak but learnt to whine, bark, sit up, roll over and beg.

  ‘Jesus, Rien, I thought my life was grim.’ Mai applies pink frosted lipstick. Delilah stops her styling, switches off the drier and inserts six hair pins between her lips. When she speaks the words are muffled. ‘So let me get this straight, hon, you’re more worried about a bunch of old feathers and bones than about the welfare of your friend who, from what you tell me, is running from the law?’ Delilah has one manicured hand on her hip, the other is ‘bouffing’, as Mai puts it, the back section of her hair. She likes her style high and pins, teases and sprays it periodically to maintain its towering structure.

  Rien feels puzzled. Among the children at the Home such tragic family stories elicited little sympathy. Few were well versed in showing concern or empathy, having rarely experienced compassion in their daily lives. She has never thought of Dog Boy’s life as grim; he was always cheerful. Rien picks up Mai’s cup full of stubbed cigarettes, walks into the kitchen where more cups and glasses are stacked, and turns the water on hard and fast. She thinks about the unknown fate of those first pets, and of Dog Boy on a mapless wandering down some mean and littered street.

  All stories begin with red and end with falling. This is what she decides. At home Rien takes out her book of rewritten news and renames it The Biography of Falling. This new title inspires a snicker from Mark who insists it’s an autobiography.

  ‘It’s not about me,’ she says defiantly, and he gives his multi-purpose response, a roll of his eyes skyward, a warm hand on the back of her neck and a knowing nod.

  They had allowed her one newspaper a week in the Home and would find it later, pages smudged and pored over, neatly folded but full of gaps. At first she had collected all the articles with her neighbour’s name above them: ‘Cassandra Cord’. Cut them out and kept them because they told another story about what her friend was thinking and how she spent her days, details and facts that Cassie didn’t mention in her occasional letters. When her name disappeared from the paper and the letters stopped arriving, she guessed that Cassie had left to have the new baby. She turned then to collecting the lurid and tragic news instead, falling stories, the tales about salt.

  Her book contained a thousand echoes of feeling translated into the safe prose of news reports. She strived for detachment, observing her own pain from a distance, a running commentary of perfectly formed sentences. She had long ago learnt to divert unwanted sensation into words and thought, letting an interpreting voice run on inside her head. Everything that touched, moved or agitated circumnavigated her senses and careened instead around her mind. That was the aim, at least, when sadness destabilised her in the lonely time after her father’s death, in the stretched-out empty seconds and minutes of waiting and listening for her mother’s voice, the footsteps that announced her homecoming, that all would be well for one more night. These mental efforts distracted from sensation, and even produced a phantom warmth, but did not devour the pain – all her keen hurts and joys were only rendered brighter and hotter, to sear more deeply.

  She tries to write each story now so that she is hardly recognisable on the page, ghosting the news. She aims for concise accounts, like in the newspapers – the considered authority of an eyewitness without the intrusion of ‘I’. But when she reads what she has written, she finds traces of herself everywhere, between the lines, coiled and sprung inside every word.

  She glues in her latest clipping, discovered on page three under the headline:

  LOVER’S LEAP OR WEDDING DAY DISASTER?

  Then rewrites the story on the opposite page:

  They decide to marry on a clifftop, facing the sea. There’s a small wedding party – fifty or so and a celebrant. The bride wears crimson satin so from the distance she appears to sailors and seagulls like a streak of blood, or a coursing vein; the dress billowing in the wind. At moments it is clear that she is wearing nothing more than her dress. It clings to her body at every westward gust. One guest notes that her bellybutton is of the protruding type; another, given the colour of the bride’s dress, wonders if that small rounded stomach contains the first stages of pregnancy. They are, after all, an unusual pair.

  After the ceremony, the couple moves to the edge of the cliff where the bride wishes to throw her bouquet. They hold hands. A slight gasp emerges from one of the bridal party who knows something of their love. Frenzied, erratic. The kind of passion that causes havoc.

  They fell? They leapt?

  It was not entirely clear.

  She would like to hold on to all the moments that can’t be stalled. Mad love. She wants some kind of proof, scientific. Calculations of desire.

  Mark tells her – trust me. I will never hurt you or leave you. I am not your father, your mother, the sisters that you never had. Tells her over and over he loves her. Tells her how and where and precisely why.

  She’s obsessed with words but doesn’t believe in them. She wants him silent and unbeseeching. When loving phrases come her way she must duck, or feel the tiny needles of impact. When he speaks her name in the middle of it all she puts her fingers to his parted lips. They make love this way, her hands to silence him, his to make her cry out.

  A wedding of salt, the honeymoon of falling – the bride’s dress is like a torrent running backward up her body so she is exposed halfway between heaven and the sea.

  Night Breathing

  He had to keep checking. That she was still there. Hadn’t disappeared in the night leaving an imprint and a faint warmth on the sheets, or slipped out in the pallid light of the morning like a ghost full of longing for somewhere else.

  He sticks his head round the bedroom door and squints into the gloom. She sleeps in a tight curl, an apostrophe that prevents possession. Her hair is strewn in an inky smudge across the pillow. He can’t believe she’s chosen to be with him, willing. Takes one last lingering look – a glance that is like breathing, that shunts air into the tight tube of his throat. His heart shudders like a newly tooled motor. Still there, drones the whisper in his head. She’s there still.

  Mortality

  One step after the other. It isn’t so hard. Why then is his heart thudding like the sound of the train he has just leapt from? Why are his palms filmed with grimy sweat, his legs turned pudding-soft?

  Dog Boy mouths the street names. Names said aloud might prompt a memory that could wipe him out on the hot concrete footpath where weeds have forced themselves through every crack and are now wilting in the heat. Dandelion, asthma weed – that’s the one that sticks to your legs, paspalum – the kind that makes your pale skin itch and rise up in tiny red welts.<
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  He has made a mental map of the place from poring over the directory at the Home, then tracing the lines on a blank sheet torn from the back of his geography book. Now all those streets and corners have come to three-dimensional life before him and he had not anticipated this wholly physical response, this heart thrum and leg shake as he walks toward Old Glick Road where he will make the one right turn that leads him into the back lanes of his childhood.

  Choko vines have covered all the long fences down the first alley where battered metal garbage bins are lined up for emptying. He practically tiptoes down that passage, his eyes on those green globes hanging pendulous on their vines. He pulls one off as he passes, feels the sticky white sap leak into his hand and wonders why some plants’ blood is watery green and others opaque as glue. He counts the houses as secretly as he mouthed the street names, bending his fingers into his palms until he runs out of fingers and lane and breath and sees the tree looming up ahead.

  The knotted rope still hangs from one of the broad upper branches, the rope he would swing on till the light dimmed and he could turn his body upside down and count the stars and not feel the cold evening creeping along his limbs. He stands before the back gate and pushes it. The wood creaks and sways, the gate is attached by one hinge only and its lower corner jams into the dirt. Once inside he leans on the back fence beneath that huge gum and lets his chest subside, wipes his gluey hands against his pants and looks about.

  The wooden house is covered with sun-bleached blue paint and looks as if it could collapse with the force of an asthmatic wheeze. Dog Boy remembers standing at the back door with his face against the warm house and peeling long strips of crunchy paint from the wall. The garden is overgrown and weedy. He makes his way through the knee-high grass and peers through a grimed window, then sees the back door is ajar.

  The flyscreen makes a dreadful screech, like a creature being killed. He freezes, looks behind him and over to the neighbouring homes, but no one is about. He presses his nose to the flyscreen and holds it there, breathing in the ancient, rusty-musty smell of it, imagining the thousand flies and insects that have bloodied themselves on its surface.

  Inside the house nothing is familiar. Most of the furniture is gone and what remains is old and torn and mouldy. He cannot remember what had filled these rooms and exactly where he had spent his days. He turns the tap in the kitchen sink and takes a slurpy drink. It was exactly like Jonas had warned him. They had talked once about where they would go should their plans to escape succeed and Dog Boy mentioned home in a tentative voice, more out of detached curiosity than any burning desire to see his parents. It was really the dogs he missed, and their warm flanks he would like to feel. But Jonas had shaken his head and laughed – no way he’d go anywhere near any house he’d ever lived in.

  Jonas had been a part-time resident at the Home, shuttled back and forth from a juvenile detention centre where he’d been sent for various crimes. The magistrate had looked kindly on his thirteen years and sent him to St Mary’s in between sentencing since, she’d said, prison was no place for a child. Jonas didn’t like being called a child, despite his age, and was hardly grateful for her decision.

  Dog Boy longed to ask more about gaol but Jonas would say no more about it. Instead Dog Boy gleaned small details from rumours and conversations overheard around the Home. The story of Jonas’s birth held him in a spell of fascination for weeks – he had been plucked, apparently, from inside the dead body of his mother, who had shot herself in the head eight months into her pregnancy. His father was in gaol and so Jonas spent his early years in a series of foster homes.

  Dog Boy asked his friend whether he’d at least consider looking for his real father – forget the fozzies, as the Home kids called them – but Jonas shook his head. The man was more stranger than father, Jonas said. Looking around at the emptied house, no signs of either his parents or the dogs, no clues to where they had moved, Dog Boy now understands this complete lack of connection. But he came here for some reason still buried within a thick part of his self and so he decides to stay the night.

  He curls up on the scratched planks of wood and listens to the wind shuffling the leaves of the gum tree. A comforting sound, like breathing, or a bush-lullaby. He sniffs to find a skerrick of their scent there, some tiny trace to remind him and conjure them up, but all he smells is dry sawdust and a thick earth odour from beyond the door. He will stay there, in the kennel his father had built in three afternoons of hammering and sawing, and be content with fleas for company in the afternoon and evening when the long shadows begin to move eerily out in the yard.

  Dog Boy digs around in his bag and pulls out the picture he had taken from the Home hall before lighting the fire. He looks down at the crumpled page of Rien’s writing and the words there bring on a longing that he knows can’t be met in the world of plants and animals. It was this same mortal need that had disturbed him so when he had overheard the sexual sounds of his parents drifting through the house. Those moans were entirely embodied, not like the noise of wind or animal.

  Before the Home, Dog Boy had been a solitary child and did not much care for company. Life alone was a landscape of heightened senses that careened around his body unbidden, untampered with; not encouraged nor destined for expression. His fondest early memories were filled with quiet moments that smelt like dog’s breath: a wet funky stink. He used to grin at a lick or the accidental touch of paw to his face. His parents might have forgotten who he belonged to but the dogs never did. He had the company of a thousand fleas and scratchings, of dog jaw chewing at eczematous dog leg, of the rich rotted dog fart stink on the breeze or in his face, of every minute’s stirring, twitch, yelp, groan, dogburp and nerve glitch that occurred as they slept or lay, eyes half lidded in the day, and he stayed alert and awake for the length of them, his nappies crusted with fur and shit, his hair matted and his four-year-old hind legs flea-bitten and scratched.

  It occurs to him that his return home has more to do with Jonas than with his parents. For it was his friend he had thought of constantly in the long winter after his death. Once Jonas had gone – he who had cowboy-confident strutted about the halls of the Home, afraid of no one, setting fire to all that pissed off, irritated or just plain bored him – and after the departure of Mark and Rien who had returned to him some kind of image of his self so that he knew for sure he truly existed, once those three friends had left he had slipped off the planet into a new brutal world where he was buffeted between bullying, insult and injury. Besides friendship, his companions had provided the protection of familiarity and the security of numbers.

  An old, niggling question made a wheedling kind of dance in Dog Boy’s head, daring him to answer it. Had Jonas shaken the match to kill the flame before he dropped it?

  Jonas’s two favourite things were to light fires and to put his face above the oily surface of a full can of petrol and pull the shimmery air hard up into his nose.

  Dog Boy moved further inside the kennel, away from the light that seemed to emphasise his repeating thought and struggled to focus instead on that old event – Jonas’s eyes when he had talked of fire and the wavy path he travelled after sniffing. Better than girls, he used to say, then he’d run his nose along his petrol-dipped fingers as if he wanted to eat them up – a gesture Dog Boy had seen before – a lewd appreciative thing the boys did after they’d been with a girl.

  If only – he’d been saying those two words over and over since Jonas’s horrible death. At least Jonas had managed to combine his two great loves at the moment of dying. Did this make it a happy moment? He left the world on a petrol high, sniffing up the fumes and rocking back on his heels to lean against the toilet walls. Then lifting the match to his cigarette. The flame moving from his hands to his mouth was like a slow buzzing firefly in the night.

  In the cool, green morning Dog Boy pokes one limb after the other from the door of the kennel and stands gazing into the gum. A picture flashes up now, of being out in the yard ea
rly one morning and looking up this way, to see five white cockatoos in the branches. For one brief moment he thought the yellow-crested birds were burst cotton flowers. Their feathers ruffed up in the grey leaves before they took flight.

  He takes a final look at the emptied house and tugs at the hot lobes of his ears where an idea is gathering. And it’s not hard, he sees, to find the stuff he needs. Wood, paper, heat and matches. He does his now familiar ritual in the centre of the lounge and laughs, imagining a barbecue there, the guests filing in down the hall to find the event taking place under the roof instead of in the yard, red flame fingers trying to stroke the ceiling.

  Dog Boy walks up, out from the underground train station, expecting sunlight but finds only patches of a greying sky between the hotels and apartment blocks that block out the light. He stands quite still amidst the rush of people and throws his head back and forth.

  Soon last night’s mournful feelings are forgotten. The Harbour Bridge astounds him with its steely complexity of ribs and girders – all the bridges he has ever crossed on outings or excursions from the Home were wonky wooden structures across brown muddy rivers, or over pathetic little creeks and gullies with barely any water in them. He wanders about the cobbled foreshore of Circular Quay, confused, disoriented. All this water! Small waves slap against the creaky pylons of the pier. When he walks up to the water’s edge he sees the greasy sheen and a sickly-looking fish beneath the surface.