Machines for Feeling Read online

  We drew pictures together. She gave me paint and crayons, textas and pencils and let me take them home. She would look at all my paintings and ask what was in them, who were the people and why they did things. She looked at the painting of me standing on the front lawn. The once bright sky above was falling down.

  ‘Mmm, it’s very red, your picture. Is that you?’

  ‘Sometimes it’s me. What do you think of red?’

  ‘I like other colours just as much, sea blue, with green in it. Why does the girl have her arms like that?’

  ‘Like what?’ I asked and remembered the germ code I had written that morning above my wrist. It would need renewing after all the washing I had done to remove the paint.

  ‘Stuck to the sides of her body?’

  ‘She doesn’t have any arms, silly,’ I told her and she really was silly because she was supposed to know everything.

  ‘Oh, really … why not?’

  Her question made me angry suddenly and the feeling bubbled around my face. I grabbed the picture and tore it into three pieces, watching her reaction. Cassie was a clever person and this was how we liked each other. Not smart like the teachers with rulers and endless blackboard pointing. But clever about other things they never talked about.

  She liked to talk about art. The word art really means to be or being. So when you’re making a picture you’re also just finding another way to be you, she said. I didn’t understand what she meant. She told me some people drew things or made things when they were upset and it helped them feel better.

  ‘Like horrid viscous medicine.’ When I said the word viscous I made it last a long time and put a hiss in the middle of it.

  ‘Well, not quite. Like when you’re feeling sad you could draw some pictures or write things down and not feel so unhappy afterwards.’

  You’d need a lot of paper for that. For drawing all the sadness onto. I thought art was about making beautiful things, things that people liked to look at and stick on their fridges. My grandma put all of my silly baby drawings on the wall behind the kitchen table so I could see them when I visited and be reminded of what a terrible artist I would become.

  Once I asked her how you could know if someone was good or evil.

  ‘People are made of all sorts of things. Do you know, it’s said that the soul enters the body of a baby through the gap in its skull – that’s why the fontanelle takes a while to close up.’

  ‘Do you think maybe I’m evil?’

  ‘Why would you say that? What do you mean by evil?’

  I shrugged. I didn’t know how to talk about the green feeling that covers me when certain people look at my face in a certain way, like my mother’s sister Juney who visited once after Dad died then went back to her home which she called ‘mah England’ as if she were queen of the snowy place. She looked at a cockroach the same way as when she heard me talk about things I knew. She pretended that I was not in the room when she spoke to Mum about me, ‘That lass’s got too many ahdees, Lou, keep her off the books for a whahle’, then she knocked on my head like it was a door. Juney had the same kind of words, which she called ‘advahse’, for Mum. ‘Keep off the bottle for a whahle,’ she said one afternoon of weeping. Juney crushed a cockroach under the white heel of her shoe. Whenever she wore those shoes I could see the tiny leg of the bug still clinging to the heel.

  I might have said evil was ‘those who crush cockroaches in white shoes’, but there was overwhelming evidence that ladies in clickety heels had nothing to do with hell at all.

  I kept my secrets tight and safe. I wrote them in the back of my Spy Diary in the invisible code of lemon juice. If I ever forgot what they were, I could iron over the page and turn the lemon words a readable brown.

  Once Cassie took me on a trip to the city. She told me she wanted to find a doll to show Kate and Theo how babies were made. I nodded and pretended I knew myself then she looked at me for a stretched-out moment and said, you should come along.

  ‘We’re after something simple, something fuss-free … like science,’ she told the woman in the first toy shop we visited. The woman shrugged and drew a map so we could find another store but it turned out Barbie was the only pregnant doll around.

  When we reached the store I stood in the purring hum of the air-conditioner and looked down two of the longest shelves I had ever seen. They were crammed with rows of Barbie dolls in fancy outfits, in gingham, cut-off jeans and pigtails, hair in every colour and style, and boxes of what the shop assistant called ‘Barbie accessories’: a campervan, a kitchenette, a wedding dress with a bright pink cake, a gleaming red car without a roof. I only had one old, stained, raggedy doll that Grandma sewed for me when I was a baby. It was stuffed with old stockings and full of holes where the tan-coloured insides poked out like strange rag-cancers.

  Cassie pointed to the shop assistant’s long brown legs, her big blonde curls and said she thought the lady was trying to become Barbie. The woman’s name was Trudy – she wore a nametag with tiny Barbies at each corner. They looked like the pictures of fairies that Kate believed came visiting with piles of money whenever she lost a tooth.

  Trudy showed us the pregnant Barbie. ‘As you can see, despite her belly, she’s still 100 per cent glamour.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Cassie said, ‘very twin-set-and-pearls. Still manages to get about in heels, does she? Clearly she’s quite the athlete.’

  I looked at Barbie. It was true, her feet did looked cramped in their high strappy shoes. When I removed them later the little doll feet reminded me of pink pig’s trotters.

  I wandered down the aisle of dolls while Cassie made Trudy strip the doll clothes off so she could see the newborn hidden inside Barbie’s body. Then Trudy caught up with me and I quickly put the doll called Becky back onto the shelf next to the other boxes where all her twin sisters sat in hot pink wheelchairs.

  ‘Share-A-Smile-Becky’s a friendly little girl, isn’t she?’ Trudy said.

  I noticed then that all the Beckys had little pink flags at the back of their chairs with ‘Share-A-Smile!’ written across them.

  ‘It’s fine for you to take a look,’ Trudy passed the doll back to me from the shelf. ‘She’s a good friend of Barbie’s, you know. Sometimes Barbie and Becky go camping together in their camper­van. I’m afraid though,’ she lowered her voice, ‘that Becky’s wheelchair doesn’t quite fit through the door of Barbie’s house.’

  ‘So she stays out with the dog on the patio when she goes visiting?’ Cassie was standing behind Trudy, with an angry look on her face. I looked up at Trudy’s badge and saw then that it had been corrected, I could see the rubbed-out shadows of the mistake underneath the new letters. It had said Turdy. I made a secret prayer that Cassie wouldn’t notice.

  ‘Well, they are making changes to that arm of the company,’ Trudy said. ‘You can, of course, take her out of the wheelchair, and then she’ll fit.’

  Cassie raised one eyebrow and Trudy said, ‘I think your little girl is quite taken with Becky.’

  I looked down at Becky who was still smiling and something hurt inside my chest. My heart felt as cramped as Barbie’s feet. My face was hot and damp. I couldn’t work out then whether I wanted Cassie to tell Trudy the truth or keep pretending that I was her daughter. I thought of my mother and wondered what she would do, and then I felt hotter as I realised, Stupid, if it was your own mother she wouldn’t have to pretend!

  ‘I’ll leave you both to it.’ Trudy walked slowly down the aisle of dolls and back to the counter.

  ‘Why don’t you like her?’ I asked and held my hands to stop them shivering.

  ‘This American stuff is horrible and she …’ Cassie shook the Barbie box at where Trudy was standing and looking closely at her nails, ‘has clearly inhaled too many fumes from her plastic friends. Come on.’ Cassie put pregnant Barbie under her arm and grabbed my hand.

  ‘Turdy doesn’t need our money,’ she pulled me so I had to walk extra fast to a counter at the other end of the shop.
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  We walked a long quiet way back through the cramped city streets to where the car was parked. I looked down at Barbie in her box on the way home and pretended she was dead in a plastic and cardboard coffin. I whispered, Rest in heavenly peace, Barbie and covered her with my blue jacket. I wished we had bought a different doll, like the one with the long gold gown made from material that looked like fishscales. Kate would have liked her because she was in love with mermaids and all things that came from the sea. Besides, the only accessory this doll came with wasn’t very interesting. Later, when Kate pulled the baby from Barbie’s stomach we saw it was just like one of those tiny toys you find in a box of cornflakes. We could have had the glow-in-the-dark roller skates. We could have had a kitchen with a blender and toaster or a bright silver surfboard.

  Later Cassie read Kate How Babies Are Made. The book said making love was a bit like tickling only lots nicer and Kate kept asking, what’s so great about tickling and I shuddered when I remembered the cartoon picture of the man’s thing. Barbie doesn’t even have a thing, Kate said and flipped the doll upside down to poke at the smooth plastic space between her legs. I wondered if Kate knew ladies had two holes, one for pee and one for the man’s thing. Kate was glad that Barbie’s undies weren’t glued on like Theo’s GI Joe doll – and we were both thankful he had permanent pants because we didn’t have to look at his thing though we weren’t even sure he had one.

  Once I heard Cassie call Barbie Awombda when she was talking to Andrew. When I asked about the new name, Cassie said she’d had a friend long ago who didn’t like men. So she changed her name from AMANda to AWOMda. But I was confused, the new name sounded sort of African – I asked her why they didn’t like men over there. Cassie laughed and said she called the pregnant doll her friend’s name because Barbie was all womb.

  The last time I bathed at her house I told her about my diving problem. I was thirteen.

  ‘When I go down into the deep they hurt.’

  ‘What kind of hurt?’ she asked as she tidied the small cabinet – she was cleaning the room around me and I did the bath when I finished, sitting naked on the enamel and scrubbing the ring off the sides.

  ‘Kind of like a throbbing feeling.’ I worried that I was developing some kind of early cancer – I imagined having them removed before they’d even grown.

  ‘Give me a look.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I held my arms across my chest.

  ‘Oh, so hold on, we are talking about your feet?’

  ‘No!’ I looked down at where my arms were folded. I didn’t know what to call them, they weren’t really breasts, and boobs sounded like the boys in the back of the school bus: the ones who once shoved a rude picture in my face. The picture showed three naked ladies having a shower and I saw that the shower hose was the hidden part of a man and the falling water yellow.

  ‘That’s a very big bruise on your leg, did you fall?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ I said. Her gaze on me was worse than going to the doctor.

  ‘Oh, you must be growing breasts, that’s what it’ll be,’ she sounded as if she wanted to celebrate.

  ‘But I don’t want them,’ I said quietly and stopped myself before I told her I found them revolting. Cassie’s breasts were large and bouncy, she might be offended by my comments.

  ‘Your mum has told you about what happens, menstruation and …?’

  I nodded and put my clothes on quickly.

  ‘It’s okay, I already know all that stuff.’ I said goodbye and ran downstairs, through the flyscreen door and down the road to the park.

  It wasn’t true that I knew about what happened when they started to grow. There was something about blood because Melissa Parker had walked around at school one day with her jumper tied around her waist to cover the stain on the back of her uniform. And one time Ania and I sat in the gutter flicking leaves with sticks and she told me how it happens every month and you can’t control it by holding your breath or squeezing your weeing muscles tight. Ania said the blood had something to do with making eggs and babies but I couldn’t remember anything about it from Cassie’s baby-making book. I know, Ania said, because my sister has it. It sounded like a disease and she showed me the lumpy white pads in her sister’s bottom drawer that smelt like the sweet flower spray Juney fizzed around our house when she cleaned it. A few weeks later I went to Ania’s place after school. In her bedroom there were ten white pads stuck to the lower section of one wall. I started laughing at how they looked sort of stranded there but I knew by the way she yelled at her little brother that they belonged to her.

  The only thing to be done was not to think about it. I closed my eyes in the aisle of the supermarket where the plastic, flowered packages sat. Nappies for old people I told myself, Ania was lying. But I couldn’t think of a story about the small boxes in Cassie’s bathroom and the wrapped white cotton bullets inside.

  It was nearly dark and the air felt damp, my hair hung in wet straps against my cheeks. I sat on the swing with my head thrown back and swung myself up high until I felt dizzy, looking at the first stars. The points of light swayed and tilted as I threw my head back then the whole white-pricked sky began to shift as if hurrying toward morning. Then I slowed and crossed my arms, secretly feeling the tiny nubs beneath my nipples. They reminded me of the little apples that grew on the tree in my grandparents’ garden – hard and round. I used to put them in my mouth and eat them in two crunches, screwing my face up at the sourness.

  II

  Everything is suspect, except the body and its sensations.

  Louis Jouvet

  What He Loves

  Dog Boy lies curled on the sandstone doorstep of a Catholic chapel. He opens his eyes to the wild surprise in the lower part of his body. It seems his loins have been invited to a party that the rest of him knows nothing about. The skin of his groin is charged and urgent, but slack and thick along the pale lengths of all his limbs. An image drifts up, a flicker of sound from his childhood: the rhythmic drifting moan along the skirting boards that kept him awake and wondering. He moves a little, pressing his weight against the cold grain of the step, then reaches down to take hold of himself, his fingers warm and fast. He snuffles, drawing hot gunk back from his nostrils. His hands grow wet and sticky, his freckled thighs tremble from the effort of stillness, the cold seeps up through the sandstone to clutch his bones.

  He thinks of Jonas and smiles, pictures him striding off to the dormitory toilets after one of his fires. Dog Boy had followed his petrol-smelling friend who turned and cautioned, ‘Nah, mate, gotta do this one alone, gotta date with Mrs Palmer and her five luscious fingers’, and winked while Dog Boy slowed then stood, rebuked, in the hall. He crouched in the gap between the lockers and waited for his friend to emerge. Some long moments later he spied them, Jonas and Damien Destefano walking out together, hitching their pants and surveying the hallways like cowboy buddies coming through a bar.

  He doesn’t know much about girls and wanting to have sex with them. He supposes that Mark and Rien are regularly huddled in that secret configuration, alone and warm in their new house. They could spend the whole day in bed if they liked. Better not to think of it. He used to stand guard sometimes by the dormitory door while they snuck inside, came out laughing and smelling strange, sweetish and full. He didn’t mind the task, so long as he was needed; he would sit and read his library books and when the girls came by he’d stop them and they’d squat beside him and swap bubble gum or talk about who was back from being fostered and the size of Miss Cavanagh’s polyester-clad bum until the time was up.

  Once Josie Parker urged him to enter the bathroom with her. She put her hot reddish hand on his bare leg and started moving it up and down. He let her make the prickling heat and the sweat there for a while as she sucked the salt from his neck saying he wasn’t really as dumb as a dog, that it was just a game he liked to play. She moved her hand into his shorts and touched all the complex stirring parts, worked her fingers until he lurc
hed back and pulled his neck away from the pressure of her lips. He felt breathless and emptied, slumping back on the bathroom wall then grabbing her hand to shove it roughly back in her lap.

  After that he began to think they actually took something from you – those girls and their working hands. If he’d been a different kind of boy he might have figured it out, made a neat pattern of why in his head. But he only knew that those moments with Josie were the most he’d been touched in his whole life and he never wanted it again. She stood quickly after he’d pushed her and swore, then called him a bum bandit, and he thought he might laugh but instead grew hot and puzzled. His hand that had shoved her was still outstretched, he might have been reaching for something. He forced it to rest in his damp lap. Josie had left the bathroom, ignoring his warning and kicking the dormitory door open. He wrenched himself upright then ran to the hallway and peered into the dormitory where his two friends lay on a far bed, all skin and movement suddenly halted.

  It’s this picture he recalls when he wonders about love. His rather wooden friends had turned their bodies smooth and lithe. He could only bear to watch for a moment, then looked away. But the image is suspended in his head and later he compares it with the other, more animal couplings that he glimpses from time to time.

  For the first time since leaving the Home a sadness has descended like damp mist. Dog Boy tries to shake his mood by focusing on the day ahead. He has no food and little money, he needs to find his friends. He stretches, curls into a ball then falls back into the tangled thicket of a dream. He struggles to free himself, flinging vine-lashed limbs into the unresponsive air. Then tumbles from the chapel stoop down the five wide steps and lands, splayed out and half exposed in a heap on the sidewalk. A man and a dog hover above him. For a short moment he is unsure if he is awake or dreaming still. The white dog snuffles and nudges him gently. He notices the man has a photograph stuck to his jacket. Dog Boy flicks the dream from his extremities and looks again: the man is real enough, he can smell the tangy sludge of his shoe polish and the welcome whiff of dog. The sky behind them is a rippled stretch of grey.