Machines for Feeling Read online

  ‘What projects? I don’t know anything about projects. There is no evidence of projects. What? You’ve done something, something weird or sick. That look on your face.’

  Pesters me for five minutes till I crack. I’d just had a chocolate malted milkshake made by The Dead Woman. She loses it. Screams and runs to the bathroom where she brushes her teeth and rinses her mouth out five times.

  Griefwork

  When she sees the picture she thinks it must be a photograph of the man as a child. It is black and white and grainy, like those in her grandparents’ albums and the man seems about their age. She sits beside him on the only seat remaining. She folds her callused hands in her lap and tries to keep her eyes forward as the bus lurches into the traffic.

  ‘Were you looking?’

  Rien turns, startled and guilty as if she has glimpsed something sacred. He moves his head slightly as he speaks, his thick glasses catching the light, then faces forward again. Rien feels relief, she prefers not to talk at all to people on the bus and if she has to address them she tries to remain looking ahead, as if watching for her stop.

  ‘It is okay, my dear, I like the people to look at him.’

  It’s then she feels the sadness of sensing, from the age and grain of the photo, from the way that he wears it, sewn like a badge on his lapel, that the pictured child is no longer living.

  ‘It is my son, Antonio,’ he says with a cheerful voice and an accent she can’t place. ‘Don’t you think he is very beautiful with his smiling eyes?’

  ‘He does have smiling eyes,’ she reassures and glances quickly again at the picture. Now she can make out a background, a tree to the right of the boy, a tie knotted at the child’s throat. The man holds out his wrinkled hand – his skin is dark and spotted. His palm looks and feels like a tree. She shakes his hand and he says in a slightly jokey manner, ‘I am Salvatore. Welcome to the club.’

  There are hundreds of them now, he tells her, throughout the city. Surely she has noticed them? Or perhaps she is the kind of girl who walks with her eyes to the ground, like she has lost something. He pauses and she wonders if he expects an answer but then he continues in his gravelly voice. It began many years ago, when another couple lost their only child and others came forward to comfort them. They would meet informally, share cups of tea and bits of information such as the best places to put posters, the names of organisations that provided financial or practical help – there was even one group that would come to your home and remove all traces of the child who had gone, clothes and toys and photographs, if that was what you wished for.

  Rien doesn’t understand this, it had seemed like another loss to her when her mother had cleared the house of her father’s things. She wanted his possessions around her, so she could make him up through their weight and bulk. She would run a finger over the passages he had read in his books as if releasing some essence of him from the page, put her feet into his too big shoes to feel the place where his feet had left their distinct print.

  The group began to formalise their meetings, the man explains, and came up with a name: Griefwork. It was he who had thought of the word because of the nature of their loss. Most do not know if their children are alive or dead. It’s hard to begin mourning when you are stuck in that halfway place, not knowing. You are stricken with grief, he says, but you’re not sure what you are grieving. It is an absence, a loss, he mutters slowly, but not a death.

  She listens, looking out the rain-streaked window now and then to note their slow progress through the city. The traffic is banked up, the peak-hour trip has left plenty of time for his story to unfold. But she begins to wish he would hurry and tell her what had happened to the smiling Antonio. Had he been snatched away in his sleep? Or disappeared after school? What did they know of his fate? Finally he arrives at her unasked questions, speaking abruptly, as if it is an aside, a small unimportant part of the story.

  ‘Antonio was taken on March 4, 1970. He was just six years old. This picture you see, it is from the papers.’

  She notices the tiny newsprint dots that make up the image, nodding slowly as he continues. The members of the group wear the pictures when they go out. It seems to work well, he says, because people look at the photograph and ask about the child in it, and though some turn away, in confusion perhaps, they are always curious and the parent can let as many people know as possible and maybe one day something helpful will come of it. It’s a nice thing too, he says, that the photographs are stitched on like this – he puts a finger to the image without looking at it, and traces its edge slowly – because the parent wearing it does not have to look at their child all day, but the image remains close to their hearts. He spreads his hand flat over the face of his child, and pats it gently, as if in rhythm with the beat beneath his chest.

  In the weeks following this conversation Rien begins to notice these tiny portraits approaching from a distance, like miniature children tucked in a coat pocket. Some of the photos are of small children, others are of babies. Most of the children are smiling, which shocks her, because these stitched images have an aura of sadness and loss. They are like the last photos taken of her father which she had one night searched through for signs and portents of what was to come: a black crow perched on a distant branch, an arrangement of fingers that sent a secret code, a surprised expression that betrayed a deep and fearful knowing, an object clutched too tightly in his broad hands. Those pictures no longer recorded the occasional happiness of family, but contained instead the clues to a coming doom. Her mother had lurched through the door in the middle of this search and assumed a tortured, visceral expression, as if a vital organ was being twisted by her daughter’s own hands. She fell upon the scattered prints and swept them into their boxes, sending Rien to bed with a silent wave. Halfway down the hall Rien turned to see her mother bent, circled by the offending cartons. Then heard her reaching for the glassy clink in her bag, a sound that filled Rien with a vertiginous feeling. She walked to her room, though she wanted to race back and form some miraculous comforting shape about those shoulders. But she knew her wish was selfish – it was she who craved the warmth of the bent body in the lounge. Her mother desired only solitude.

  All the parents passing her on the street have a dull, lustreless expression. She imagines that after years of searching they have learnt quickly which features to notice and which to ignore in passing strangers: hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, height. She looks like no one’s missing child, she decides. Even before she left for St Mary’s, her mother had become well practised in the art of looking beyond her, as if somewhere in the distance her father might still be alive and beckoning.

  She shakes the man’s hand when they reach her stop. His palms are dry and rough. He thanks her for listening and asks if she will keep an eye out for Antonio, pressing a printed flier into her hand. Something shifts at her feet, she sees two white paws and a wet nose sticking out beneath the red vinyl seat. A guide-dog. She notices again the thickness of the man’s lenses, the way he remains facing ahead. Later, embarrassed, she remembers how she had responded to his story, nodding now and then but barely speaking. Keep an eye out. But how did such a father expect to find his son? She wondered if he had perhaps trained the dog to do so, using some of the boy’s old clothing to establish a scent.

  She heads down the littered street that leads her home to Mark. Planes pass so low overhead that she worries that someday one will drop and plough a new alley through the buildings before her, crushing their home, Mark, or the salon. In these visions it’s not her own death that she fears, but the thought of being the only one left alive. The cremains, Mark told her, was what they called the charred remnants of people who are burnt not buried. Along the street she dodges the smashed bodies of birds that have fallen from the sky and feels a ghosty shudder. She thinks of all those missing children and of her cohabitants at the Home, dreary and grey as the gravy that spoilt the nightly meat they ate for dinner. The cordial at mealtimes was obscenely brigh
t in the face of such pallor and the Christmassy red and green liquid soured in the mouth though it was always oversweet.

  We were the young birds whose mothers left us, she thinks. On her bleakest days she notices only the events that will lead to accident and injury. Death curved like a dark wing in every corner of the city.

  Surgery

  At 6 am Rien’s curled in bed. Won’t touch me lately. Writhing with stinking ghosts at night. It’s been a week empty of words. A daily short-circuit in every room of the house. Makes me move close to the walls, longing for old habits. Switches and plugs. Wires and cords and control panels.

  I bring her coffee to the bed. Puff the pillows behind her back. She rubs her nose from the itching dust.

  ‘Everything’s bleak.’

  Something’s rising besides the sun. The bluish light on the horizon pulls memories up from the hard part of my body. A wiry black mesh in my head that makes me blink rapid-fire. I plugged myself into childhood. Because a switch could make me alive or dead. Connected. Unconnected. Life flows or it’s cut off. Now I’m trying to work it out. How to control infinity. The scariness, the ruinous metallic colour.

  ‘Not everything – look how your garden grows, Miss Quite Contrary.’ I point to the yard where the flowers she planted are struggling up out of the soil.

  ‘Burnt ground and mud.’

  ‘Well, the flowers love it. You know Buddhists say the lotus loves the muck of the swamp, thrives on it.’

  I uncoil my complex mess of circuits. Rewire myself though every neuron in my system wants its old familiar order. I try to find the tiny wire to trigger this new memory. The one that says I can find a different comfort in routines and the rigour of a ticking clock. A change from the chaos of my early years.

  I remember my mother laughing. Not cruelly. Each time she watched me plug myself into the wall.

  Before food.

  In order to eat. Before sleep.

  In order to.

  She bought me string and cardboard to build my structures. Must have been some love in that. Father No. 3’s laugh though, nasty. Laugh that would disrupt the flow. Crackling along my slung wires. Disturb. Disturb. Tremors in the system.

  ‘Mrs Stephens has become a Buddha, because her daughter’s dying. They have to look at dead bodies to learn about life’s fragility. Those kids at the Home, all their stories, they’ve gone way off the dial of my disgust-o-meter. If death and disaster’s what it takes for enlightenment I’m Buddha now, I’m fucking G-O-D.’ Her voice is high and tremory.

  ‘It’s Buddhist, not Buddha – that’s the fat guy, legs crossed. We’re reborn, over and over till we get it right,’ I say.

  She looks at the lines mapped across her palm.

  ‘Life’s just a sort of dress rehearsal for the next one.’

  ‘God, you think this is, like, practice?’

  ‘You’re asking the right person,’ I look up at the flaking ceiling.

  ‘I said God’s name in vain. Ania used to scold me with that phrase all the time and I thought she was talking about veins under the skin and I could never work out what she meant. She had a glow-in-the-dark Virgin Mary. I was so jealous I could have nicked it.’

  ‘But feared you’d be punished for the sin of stealing?’

  ‘I was scared that when I got it home it wouldn’t glow for me … it’d prove for sure I was doomed.’

  I stretch my brain. Try to find the part that makes cheery things to say. Can’t remember where it is or if it even exists. I saw a chart in an old anatomy book once with all the sections labelled. What would it be called – that bit? The bullshit lobe probably. She drags herself from the bed and into the kitchen. I follow on her heels. A puppy wanting love. Try to tell her about the documentary I’d watched the night before. It wasn’t just the story I wanted to share. A way of saying how this distance is making me crazy.

  ‘You should have seen it. Three surgeons had to operate on twins. Siamese. Girls. As the day for their separation gets close they get all confused and upset. And then. The weird thing. The twins start calling each other their own names! They knew what was going on. Doctors drew lines down their bodies for the knife. Took them ages to work out how to do it fairly.’

  ‘Two people or one. Which was it?’ she asks, transfixed by the view out the window. Sky’s grey and patchy, old bloke limps down the street. No shoes, feet swollen and oozing with sores.

  ‘Well, they had to work out how to divide them. They shared a couple of organs. Not sure which. But one girl was bigger, greedier ’cause she used up both their food. Must’ve been joined at the stomach or something.’

  ‘Two brains makes it two, but what about one stomach?’ She picks a hangnail from her finger then bites it hard. Grabs the newspaper and starts riffling through it.

  ‘After surgery one girl’s arm kept reaching. Over and over. To where she was used to her sister being. Just kept feeling into the empty space beside her.’

  All your life you’ve got this built-in companion. Has no choice but to stick by you and vice versa. Someone comes along, says you can’t live together. It’s not healthy.

  ‘Have you seen the guy down the road with the thing, the doll stuck to his jacket? Mrs Tawee reckons he must have been a twin.’ Rien looks back out the window like he might be passing by. Larry on his morning walk to the littered park.

  ‘So they sliced the twins apart with a scalpel,’ I continue.

  ‘Knives for flesh,’ she says. Doing the bird thing with the word. Half the sound’s flown away. Ignore this ghost voice coming at me.

  ‘In a year the little twin died. But … her sister just got bigger and healthier.’

  ‘Do you think Larry believes the doll is alive, or just pretends to talk to it so people will leave him alone?’

  ‘I was talking about the twins not Larry and his fucking plastic doll. Real people who got sliced up.’

  She’s paused now at the horoscope section of the paper. Reads this religiously, like she hopes it’ll counteract all the bad news in the other pages. Tracks Dog Boy’s progress through the city according to Mystic Shevaznay whose photo shows stars and half-moons plaited through her hair. Journeys and meetings with old friends, Rien says importantly, tapping the Pisces logo. She thinks it’s funny that he and I are water signs and not fire like she is.

  Thought she’d want the twin story for her book. I was so used to seeing it open on her lap. Cuttings falling out all over the place. Held together with ribbons. But she hasn’t brought it out for days. I want to tell her ‘this story’s about us’, the widening gap that’s making her shrink. The fading colour in her face.

  Sighs at me, then says she’s tired. Sort of apologetic. Looks down again at the paper and reads her own stars aloud. Something about auspicious colours and numbers.

  Something’s severed. Something that nourished both me and her. Is it being apart or together that’s making her drift? Maybe like those twins, doesn’t matter which. Connected or cut. One of us is going to suffer.

  The Problem with Diving

  ‘Oh how fantastic!’ Cassie exclaimed the first day she saw my bare feet. I was stepping into her foamy bath.

  ‘You will never drown with feet like that. You’re a born survivor,’ she told me later and I’d let her part my toes and hold my feet up to the light so the webbing between the second and third toes glowed pinkly.

  ‘Ducky duck duck,’ said Kate when she saw them and Theo made a noise which Kate reckoned was a quack but was just a baby’s screech and the only word he could say.

  Cassie’s hair never looked brushed, she had long legs and a neck that stretched so I thought of a giraffe when I saw her leaning over the fence. She wore tortoiseshell glasses that made her eyes look bigger than they were. Sometimes I played with her kids, Kate and Theo, who wore other people’s clothes like me. Our sleeves were either rolled up or yanked down because other people had longer or shorter arms than ours.

  Sometimes I would find things in the pockets of the
clothes and I would pull them out before they were washed. I didn’t like to wear them straight from the shop, they smelt like strange houses and the wee smell of cats. Bits and bobs was what my grandma called the odd things found in pockets or behind the couch, but they were buttons and two-cent pieces and cryptic messages on small crumpled bits of paper: one said free from germs which gave me the idea to write FFG on the soft part of my arm before school to guard me against the stinky touch of boys. Even if they touched your bag or desk their germs were upon you and this kind of protection was important. Some girls didn’t mind and played catch and kiss at lunchbreak. I didn’t like the game, even though I could run very fast, because Todd looked toadish and freckled and when I played once he ignored all the girls and only wanted me for kissing.

  Sometimes I would find an old tissue in the other people’s clothes and it would make me squeal and throw the crumbling thing across the room. Cassie’s kids always had shiny gobs of snot running from their noses. I used to feel sick when they licked it up. I don’t like snot, custard or yoghurt. Cassie says I am allergic to viscosity and I found the meaning of that dotty word from Dad’s big dictionary. She is right.

  I stayed over on the weekends and Kate fed me spaghetti dinners with her fingers, laughing hysterically at my sauce-dribbling mouth. Spaghetti is okay even though Kate calls it dinner of snakes. Spaghetti is not viscous though it can be sticky and Cassie will throw a piece against the wall to see if it is done. If it sticks it’s slurping time, if it droops and falls like an old tired worm it needs a healthy boiling. Sometimes Cassie ran me baths that smelt of flowers, or a Grandma scent of lavender. Lavender comes from flowers that grow well in France. Ms Bell showed us fields of them in language class and said lavande, she also said les fleurs. Some French words remind me of mucus rolled around in the back of schoolboy throats. German words are not so viscous. Cassie sat on the bath edge with her long feet soaking, telling stories and pretending not to look at my collection of dirt and bruises.