Las Vegas for Vegans (20 page)

For a moment he was blind with killing fury. He wanted to put his forehead through the hard dirt floor of their run-down cottage. Wanted to drive his forehead down like a pickaxe into stubborn soil. Wanted to slam his head down into the ground even if he spilled out his brains. He could almost feel it done, ‘accomplished' was the word that came to mind, but the rattle of his brain against the bone of his skull scared him—because death wasn't certain; because it was at least as much of a lie as life.

He saw the belt slung over the back of a chair as he struggled to his feet. How could a man forget his belt like that? Why did he take it out? How did he pull up his pants and forget it? Because he couldn't forget. Because he didn't forget. He
wanted
Victor to know that his mother had been fucked tonight, like a whore working from a shack. He groaned as he wrapped his fingers around the axe again and lifted it. ‘Like a split apple,' he muttered, as he felt it between the halves of his own brain.

5

I'm pressed firmly between her knees—at the hips. What did I do? It's always hard to remember. One thing turns into another, and there's a kind of build-up, and it's hard to say how it all ebbs and flows. If I ever thought it was a kind of madness (or if not that, not insanity, then some strange driven perversion of the mind) I know I was wrong. If I'm honest. It's easier to think that, pressed between hard, unyielding knees. Sometimes you look around at the world, and I mean beyond suburban reality, to what we do for profit and power, what we condone every day, and look at history and all it's worse and worse, and it just goes to say, it's not beyond the pale, out of this world, something strange at all. And it's harder to say what's mad when you look at things, and what's a perversion of the mind, because, here, her anger is spent, and my arms are welted with it and the belt she used to inflict it. She looks calm and speaks evenly. ‘Stop crying.' Slapping my face. ‘Stop crying.' Again calm. Again even. Slapping the other side. ‘Stop crying.' Slapping with a solid hand. Slapping again, until my head rocks around. ‘Stop crying.' That even, steady voice. And I do. I stop crying, and later wonder if there's something in a mother's blood and the way it runs with earth nearer the root than a man's ever does, that whispers of long waterless winters and hard, unforgiving ground.

6

Victor's mother ran outside, in her nightdress, and looked around, knowing the nearest cottage was a half-hour's walk across dead, cold country. She'd climbed that oak tree once as a lark with her dead husband when she was not yet eighteen, and when she passed it, not knowing where to go, or what to do, her own son staggering behind her with an axe in his hand, she caught the bottom branch in a leap she wouldn't have thought herself capable of, and pulled herself up. She climbed up as high as she dared go. She knew it wasn't the alcohol or his losses at cards, really. Those just made it possible for him to act on his righteous fury. It amazed her, that streak of fire from God's right hand, because she'd only ever seen it before in her dead husband, and he couldn't have learned it from him. And it wasn't that he was a violent man or that he was mad, at least not any more than a lot of people out here in the middle of nothing and nowhere. Even when he was ranting, more animal than man, she knew the problem was genius. He had been given a mind capable of inventing electricity, but it was thrown in a place of dirt and wood. He'd taught himself how to read and write; when the old school teacher had died it had taken over ten years to get someone in from Melbourne City to replace her. The problem was that fierce intelligence in his brain turned to poison.

7

We both lie on the couch. A film rolls along to the credits and my mother sleeps. I can hear it in her breath that she's dreaming, like I was only a moment ago, and I can feel that she's sleeping in the intense warmth of her body below the blanket that covers us. I have my arm around her, and my palm on the flesh of her belly. Flesh so thick it's more like the crust of the world than just a woman's skin draping her bones. She sleeps, and I don't want her to wake up. I want to sleep, but only as far away as an eyelid, so that dreams won't take me anywhere else. The credits keep rolling and in a few seconds there will be music or a commercial and she will wake. All those names roll across the screen, white on black, meaningless to me and my mother. In a moment it will end. I close my eyes and listen to her dream.

8

My grandfather stood below, shouting up at his mother. His cursing always was appalling. Inventive in its profanity. But he had an axe and wanted to use it. When it struck into the cold hard oak it turned his arms to jelly. He was forced to use the axe on the upper branches. In the end, he threw it up at the woman, and brought her down to the ground. She could have died instantly from the fall but she didn't. He carried her back into the house. Doctors were far off and she died from an infection in her broken bones a week later. The purest agony. One that followed her into dreams, pulled her out, and showed her how many tools has torment, how many faces suffering. Minute to minute, fracturing any movement, breaking breath like glass. Pain that dulled only when she began to actually die, cursing him and his name every sleepless minute, and with her dying whisper, cursing him again.

9

Perhaps someone spilt coffee on Victor's jacket, hung as it was on the back of a chair. Maybe it was his only one, because he certainly didn't have money to spare. Even money that couldn't be spared went as easily as the slick gloss of playing cards on the thumb. Which made it worse. Worse in winter, holes in shoes, and worse when tatters and threads let in all the cold, and worse when girls did not complain. In any case, outside the warm little two-room cottage, it was winter. Water outside had crystallised, so when you walked across grass it crackled beneath the soles. Every breath billowed out into clouds of steam, but only at the start. When the trembling came, breathing wasn't as warm, and then there wasn't much steam in the breath at all. If you approached from the road, you would travel for about five minutes along a path to the cottage, between two unused fields. There was no light anywhere but that which struggled out around the two shuttered windows. A few stars above, revealed occasionally through a break in the clouds. The gibbous moon peeking down now and then as those black clouds moved across. And if you continued, moving over the low fence made out of planks of wood mostly missing, you would have come to the wooden door of the cottage, and found the light warmly glowing at its edges. You would have found, on the doorstep, the huddled bodies—stripped naked and thin to the bones—of his three girls. Rhonda, Millie and Muriel. Being punished. They could hear him inside talking in that warm, enthusiastic way they loved. Talking to two of his friends. Two men the girls saw every week, who had children they talked to at school.

10

Victor died of a cold. He was old enough that it didn't seem absurd when we heard about it. I suppose we thought he was going to pull through. He'd always had chest problems— pleurisy, pneumonia, bronchitis and asthma. Years before, my mother had rushed out to Kaniva because it looked like he was going to die, and brought him back to a Melbourne hospital. In a photograph he's in bed, but half raised as if he's saying something. It's not clear to whom he's speaking. To his right, a friend sits quietly, looking at him. On the other side, but at the tucked-in corner of the bed down at his feet, my mother, turned around to look at the camera. Victor casts his voice between them, his left hand raised, but the bones in his exposed chest speak of both the illness and the tenacity. It's my mother's face that is interesting. She's turned her head to the left, towards the photographer. In the face of his daughter is fear, clearly, but it isn't simply worried fear—her father close to death. It is a more familiar fear that began early, perhaps even before she could form words for such a thing as terror. When Victor died she may have cried, and her face might have found the entire range of grief expressions, but deeper than all those is the bleached-white expression in the photograph.

11

I'm waiting for the flames to destroy the image of me. There's a moment when it looks like the photo won't burn. The boy stands within it—his mouth open, his eyes closed—as though he can feel the flames beyond the plastic border. He is screaming, naked, and all I can feel is shame. I'm a few years older. Old enough to feel embarrassed at the sight of my own penis in the photograph. It's the nakedness that is the clearest cause for this immolation. But it's a densely packed reason, more like blood in my brain unable to cool or flow than thoughts or words. The decision made me, rather than the other way around. It wasn't a mystery though, this photo, not like the hospital room when they were turned around looking at different people on the walls behind. There might have been a reason for the punishment, but not one I could understand for why a mother would take this kind of photo of her son.

12

That oak still stands out there in Kaniva. If you walk around the tree, you might be unaffected by its silence, or perhaps walk away with whispering thoughts trailing up into the air like puffs of smoke from a cigarette. Long gone are the puffs of breath from those shivering bodies—crystals of ice in the grass and collecting in the long hair of those girls. And yet it's not a naked nothing in its silence. It spells itself out in the roots that brawl through rocky ground and shove aside slabs of stone. Its sentences are written out in the air, and they may not be for a man to read, but he'd have to be blind not to see it was the great poem of love written to the sun. In its bark, initials have been carved because names are soon forgotten, but there are traces of the lives that have passed beneath its branches. The oak won't reveal who planted it. It's less a mystery than a suggestion that if it wasn't always and ever where it stands, then time before it can't matter, might as well never have happened. If a rope was hung from one of its limbs, the tyre of that swing long gone, then only the groove in the branch where children swung means anything. Only that groove will tell you how many times a child swung, and how high some of them managed to go. That groove will explain all you need to know. Why should words scratched on paper mean any more? Paper burns easily. Evidence of this kind is often destroyed. Even so, you might find that grooves have been cut into your own body, despite flesh being so good at hiding these traces of children swinging through, screaming up into the branches, or names being carved where scars don't ever reach. In the bones are sentences that spell out the names of those who planted trees and wrote out stories about an oak that was covered in snow once. How a few times it bore Christmas decorations and that it carried a tyre at the end of a rope for close to three decades. Then just a rope, the frayed end turning in the wind like the long cord of a woman's braided hair.

13

Victor was well known in the region as a man who taught children to read; that he put a passion into them for words and thought. He was widely respected as a man of wisdom and was occasionally brought in to settle disputes between bickering neighbours. He had the shire build a monument to the Boer War so that it wouldn't easily be forgotten, what our ancestors have done.

UNSUBSTANCE

You might think I don't know the difference between day and night. But even in the wherever and whenever, there's the roseate glow of sunlight through the skin, which is never thought of that way but only as eyelids. Not ever as lids, like the eyes were jars, and if they were, then you would have to think about what an inordinate amount of thought they would contain. If I start thinking this way then I'll eventually get to a point where it seems that a substance in a jar can be like a conserve—a jam made out of dreams. Maybe that's all I am right now. Guessing that the light through my eyelids is that of the sun, wondering and wandering off again into why we only call it starlight when it's evening and not starlight when it breaks into the planet like a flood of water, but more of an endless ocean really, running through everywhere and everywhen until there's barely a place where some of it doesn't come through to offer just that minimal glow. Even here with my heavy lids screwed on tight and never opening anymore or anywhere. I wait for it, because it's not like water at all, and is opposite, neither zenith nor nadir, but motes adrift through the still air of the room I can't see around me, and the oxygen adrift in the blood I can feel within the stretch of my skin, allowing me to know I'm not dead (though you may have made that mistake looking at me), and it all makes me hate the idea of the hole, dug six feet down into the soil, and the box nailed shut. Makes me wait with a kind of lust for the pink shoosh of sunlight across my face.

I lie on the bed. I think. I dream. I lie on the bed.

Does it matter why? Could it? Look into the skull worm clean, and wonder what dreams. The infinity melted away to leave smoothed-out bone. See, the weight of dreams, less than that of smoke, is still something. Not quite
nothing.
There's an entire universe of illusion, of endless passions and the more fragile tugging of feelings, just as ceaseless, and fathers and mothers in memory, fears and agonies, all cast with a conviction celluloid will never conceive. All a film of flesh that sunlight creates its images with as it passes through. There was a man, is all I want you to know. He closed his eyes. He could not open them. But he reached and he writhed. He breathed while suffocation pressed and wrung him of even those almost weightless whims. Compressed within the grey folds, like a rag wet with petrol and sealed in a thick jar, there is the sulphuric red spot of a match that cannot be struck. The grey rag, think of it as a tissue that belonged to God. Destroyed through use. Just the useful little thing in a moment of inconvenience. Which is almost as much as he could have ever hoped for. To be of use. But it wasn't a tissue. Wasn't a rag, soaked in gasoline, sealed in a glass jar. No speck of red. Just this thought that can't be struck alight. Just this attempt to find you and bring you close enough to rub. He conceived of me and sent me to you. Breathe on the glass and you will find a note. A mark. A crack as much as a whisper. Something happened. Something leaked away—some substance. Look closely at this face behind the glass. Something happened.