Creepy and Maud (9 page)

People were laughing and cheering, but I was watching Jack Sparrow’s face. He looked ashamed. All of his authority, all of his control, draining out of his eye sockets, leaving his head deflated and his body mortified. He stumbled out of the ring with the dog still attached. That’s who I saw when I waved at Li. Jack Sparrow from the circus, with a little dog clenched onto his flesh. Except I was the little dog. He was bitten and, at that moment, too ashamed to have any other response than to drop his hands from Maud’s head and stumble out of her bedroom. I knew I had to execute the next part of my plan while Nanna’s guests were still eating, drinking and making merry, so I wrote and placed the following without thought or preamble:

—Meet me at the side fence

I ran downstairs as quickly as I could. I was still picturing Lionel removing my teeth from his belly when I reached the fence. I could just see between the pickets. I could smell curry and see profiteroles. There were some decent looking salads, too. Some music I didn’t recognise was playing on a portable CD player. Panpipes? Bloody hell—cheerio, Nanna! No music at the dig site but panpipes at the party! As I waited at the fence, I
wondered for a moment if she would really come. Then I saw her coming down the back steps on the other side of the trestle table. She crossed the lawn quickly and arrived at the fence a little south of my location. I adjusted my position accordingly until we would have been face-to-face if not for the picket fence between us. We had never been this close before.

I could hear her breathing. I reached my hand up and over the top of the fence. She stood there for a minute, not responding, then she reached up and I felt her fingers graze my fist. I opened my hand and dropped the little gold apple charm into her palm.

It’s about an hour later, and Limo-Li is taking a swing at my dad. I am upstairs watching Maud, who has removed her belt and unbuttoned her funeral dress. The little gold apple charm is fastened to her bellybutton ring, shiny and secure against her white belly.

Nan-na-was-my-friend. She had been sick for a long time. She did not even know who I was anymore. She had become this tiny thing, with skin like crepe paper, as translucent as an insect wing. She did not speak, she just spent her days curling in on herself, getting smaller and smaller, until she looked like some sort of in-utero thing. A kidney bean with little buds that would never again grow to be arms and legs, but would rather wither away until she would fit inside my doll’s house. I was fascinated, and repulsed, by this transformation. I hated going to see her.

I know I should be feeling something and I feel bad because I do not. I feel the same way I did when I had to do the readings in chapel. Everyone is looking at me,
everyone expects something from me, but my voice is no longer my own. It is being suctioned out of me and dissipates immediately, so the only thing that is real is the returning echo. But it is a Chinese whisper, this echo. It spins around the Nanna-void and is forced back inside me, carrying the weight of everyone else’s breath. It is not me anymore. I have become a kidney bean myself. Creepy laughed at the Nanna-void. Perhaps that is the only right thing to do.

I saw him at the cemetery. I wondered if I looked nice. Mum picked out the dress for me to wear. It was too big. It did not really match the hat. I stood there feeling clammy and all poured out and something else I did not recognise at first. I felt aware. Aware that my dress was too big and my hat did not match. Aware of my shoes sinking into the grass. Aware that to Creepy, in that moment, I must look just like the big hole in the ground they were going to put Nanna in forever. I tried to imagine being in that hole. I tried to imagine I was a be-ing-in-the-hole. With dirt in my hair and my mouth, my arms pinned to my sides by earth as heavy and cold as Mum’s funeral face. But all I wanted to do was get back to my safe space, the space between the windows, where Creepy would suck me into his big binoculars and I could leave my bloodied fingerprints inside his head. A lot of people turned up at Nanna’s funeral. I thought
they were Mum and Dad’s friends, but it turns out they were Nanna’s. Mum couldn’t wait to get them out of the house. I heard her telling Dad that all their mourning was making the place look untidy. She said it with a tight smile and Dad rubbed her back, but I think she really meant it. It is as if emotions, anyone’s emotions, make her feel vulnerable. She put food out for Nanna’s friends. That was the day Creepy gave me the little gold apple. I wear it on my bellybutton ring. And that was the day we touched for the first time. Just our fingers over the fence, and just a little bit, but it sent a funny feeling down my spine. It was not excitement. It was keener than that. It was hope. A small helix of trust twanged my spine and made it shiver with expectancy. I recognised the sensation immediately. It was the same feeling I get when I pull. Comfort, anticipation, and even more than that: optimism. I thought: he could be my friend.

It is not often that my dad and Creepy’s dad actually hit each other. I like it when they do. It removes the focus from me for hours, sometimes days. I also like that these fights are not like fights in the movies or on telly. There is never that satisfying cracking sound of reciprocal punches hitting bone. And no one ever stays on their feet. The two of them just roll about on the lawn together, making noises as if they were in love. That is what it looks like, anyway.

I watch them. They don’t actually connect with one another much. Fists flail about, but it all descends pretty quickly into a mixture of salsa dancing and wrestling. They do girl things to each other, too, like hair pulling and slapping. I am pretty sure someone has been bitten. Creepy’s mum shadows the action, throwing her arms around and screaming. That dog of theirs with the strange name is almost rabid with excitement. It is all going perfectly until I notice my mum. She is crying.

She just sits on the front step and cries. I have never seen her cry before. It scares me. And it is not just a cry, it is a bawl. Her face is as fractured and raw as a freshly peeled walnut. It puts a damper on things pretty quickly. One by one, everyone notices the crying lady. Creepy’s dad tells that dog to shut up. Creepy’s mum goes back inside. My dad sits on the lawn for a bit before getting up and going in. He walks straight past my mum.

I feel scared and I hate her for it. I sit on the front step next to her and it is as if she does not see me at all. When I put my hand out, as tentative as the insect wing my Nanna had become, and rest it on her arm, she slaps it away. She goes inside then. And I see I have blood under my fingernails.

She did not even cry when she found out her mother was dead.

Coda: When I put out my hand, I feel scared and I hate her for it.

I’ve always wanted to believe in religion. It all seems so nice. The idea of life having a formula, a recipe, is really quite comforting. Do this and this, add this, mix with this, live three score and ten, and come out cooked. And you go to Heaven. Capital H. A real place. Then there’s Jesus, of course. So even if you miss a few steps of the recipe along the way, Jesus is a sort of prescription to cover up the mistakes—the cornflour in the gravy, the crushed pineapple in the chilli, the bicarb in the toffee pudding. (I took cooking at school because the
alternatives were fencing or synchronised swimming.)

I could never get all in, though. I was sort of embarrassed about struggling to accept something so unreasonable. I still like the idea of it. Maybe I should go with one of those religions with a living prophet. One of those groups that dress like pioneers. (Maud would look good in a bonnet.) Do they get updated revelation? Maybe there have been doctrinal advances that the rest of us haven’t heard about. Those groups would probably keep that kind of information close to their chest. You’d have to be on the inside to hear what God was saying to his people these days.

My mum has got religion. She picked it up at the supermarket. There were these young, attractive people handing out pamphlets and salvation one day when she was popping in for some sausages and stewing meat. She always goes to church. Not just at Christmas and Easter, but always. She talks about her religion and Dad has a go at her and she feels persecuted and that seems to please her. My understanding is you’re supposed to feel persecuted if you’re saved. Something about being closer to God through suffering. And Mum does suffer. There are days Dad would gladly nail her to the back fence.

Mum used to take me to church with her for a while, when I was still young enough to be dressed in clothes that would otherwise get me beaten up. I liked
it. The building was cool and dark and old, and all the wood was polished. There was always singing and it didn’t matter how badly you sang; it always seemed to sound good. Before the sermon started, I would be taken out the back to a big hall, where all of us kids were told stories and got to colour in pictures of saints. It was the day some lady told us that animals don’t have souls that the whole thing started sounding a bit iffy to me. I remember my crayon stopping in mid-stroke while I considered this new information. They were those awful wax crayons that never give good coverage. The ones where you have to press really hard and end up getting colourer’s cramp. Anyway, I was quite cross. I remember thinking two things: how the hell would she know whether animals have souls, and why wouldn’t anyone spring for some decent coloured pencils or textas for us?

On the way home in the car, I asked my mum about animals and souls. It was before I knew that parents are really the last people you go to with real questions. The only questions you should ever ask parents are the ones that begin with ‘Can I have’ and ‘Can I go’ and that’s only because those questions usually involve the need for cash. But you only find that out through trial and error (mostly error on their part), so I asked her, ‘Do animals have souls?’

My mum didn’t answer me straight away. But that
was okay. The Sunday school ladies never answered straight away, either. I was never bothered by these pauses when it came to church questions. Church questions require pauses. It gives the answers, when you get them, a certain authority. My mum was pretty then, too, and information from attractive people is much more believable. When she told me, with all the authoritative weight of pauses and prettiness behind her, that animals don’t have immortal souls because they don’t have proper hearts, I cried all the way home.

Years later, when I put the same question to her while she was nursing a fresh puncture wound from Dobie Squires, she was less sure. All she said was: ‘I fucking hope not.’

Mum didn’t know the answer, really, but felt obliged to make something up that sounded at least partially consistent with the negligible amount of doctrine she had managed to absorb. Good on her for having a go. But I can date my resistance to church pants and church attendance from the processing of that information. Animals don’t have souls. I suppose that’s why we can eat them with impunity. I never looked at my guinea pig the same way again, though. And I was angry with God for withholding a real heart from Chuckles.

All this is how I’ve ended up in a religious school. Dad went along with it because he thinks I’ll get a better
education at a private school. I know this because he often says from the head of the dinner table, ‘A person will always get a better education at a private school,’ and Mum wraps both hands around her tumbler of red and nods like a sage. This is supposed to be the panacea. After every problem at school or with school, Dad will intone: ‘A person will always get a better education at a private school.’ Not that any of the problems at school involve me. But any and all problems, from uniform violations to girls drawing dirty pictures, inspire the production of one of those expensively produced parent flyers and guarantee Dad’s dinner-table mantra. (A recent flyer revealed that better education is not the only thing you get at a private school—apparently, a better grade of weed is available in private school toilets.)

Religion seems all too fragile and easily offended to me. It’s not that there are more rules in religion than in other things. It’s that it doesn’t cope well when the rules are broken. It sends flyers and has meetings and rewards guilt and exclusivity. And then, before you know it, it’s bombing buildings. If you ask me, God seems awfully sensitive. Maybe he
is
a girl!

I got to thinking about religion again after Maud’s nanna died. Especially when my mum baked one of her famous sausage curries (with sultanas in the sauce) and took it next door. She looked really happy when she
came back from delivering it. Within a week, though, she was bitching about the fact that they hadn’t returned the casserole dish. She even asked Dad to go get it. He refused. It soon occurred to me that Mum didn’t really want the dish back. She could build years of acrimony from that ‘stolen’ casserole. The casserole dish, and what was in it, was a symbol of Mum’s agenda. Every now and then, during a wee nip, I’d hear her muttering, ‘I even put sultanas in the sauce.’