Swallow the Air (4 page)

Sometimes people stand in the way of other people's eyes. I wasn't waiting for change; I wasn't waiting anymore for things to get better. I took the mango into my mouth, my teeth traced in yellow stringy sweetness. I took all of him, away from Aunty, away from her fermented eyes.

She didn't see the postcard from my dad like I did, she couldn't see the piece of me, even if it was only paper. She held her booze like a butcher's knife, cleaving off each part of herself – and her own. I would sit on the back steps, blocking out her drunkenness, only imagining Darwin.
If you could be any fruit what would you be?
I would be the mango that breaks off the stem into my dad's fingers, the apple of his eye before I slide into the picking bag.

I pulled the zipper of my backpack tight over the nylon. When it reached the end of two rows of teeth it busted open and a slight gap of black shine hung out like a sock end. I stepped off the porch and padded across the grass to the cycleway, feeling like a seagull, taking the air into my wings, tucking under the busted red leg that wouldn't matter in flight.

I knew a squat where a friend had been staying; I'd been there with her once to pick up her sleeping bag. I remembered they said I could come round. The words stuck to me. ‘Come back and stay anytime, sister.' The invitation shone beyond the damp memory of the house, through its empty lines, the wet walls.

The house wheezed, jammed between the new motorway and the train line, alongside the lapping sidewalk that rose and fell like undulating limbs. The garden path ran through the small yard where a woman and a man were arguing, her hand gripped his pawpaw bicep as she grunted into his face, muttering something about money. I traced around them, to the steps and peeped through the open door.

‘Hey, girl! I know you don't I? Who
are
you?
He sits cross-legged in the sunroom beside the frayed vinyl lounge. ‘You've been here before, I know you!'

His hands closed in his lap fly out and grab memory from the space between us.

‘Yeah, I've been here; I'm looking for my friend Crystal. She was stayin here, hey?'

I thought back to the time I'd visited, there were people hanging around everywhere, a drug house of anxious nobodies. And now, here I was, hiding that same, quiet desperation.

‘Yeah yeah
yeah,
Crystal, she's a nice girl, haven't seen her for
ages.'

I watch his eyes move from the thought of Crystal to my rucksack. ‘Need somewhere to stay, girl?'

‘Yeah ... Last time I was here, you guys said I...'

Before I could finish, he'd jumped up and was leading me down the hallway to a big room with a drum kit and a mattress in it. He grabbed a piece of foam off the mattress and laid it down in the opposite corner.

‘Welcome. This is my room but I don't mind sharing. Don't worry, it's safe.'

He went on about how he got his name and
where he was from and the rules of the house;
community
he kept saying, shooting thoughts like tearing open birthday cards. I could hardly track his jagged mind. He was friendly and kind of jittery and silly with a mange of tight curly hair, like a jack in the box or, as some must have thought, a sheep.

Sheepa gnashed his sentences a few times and broke into a grin, his jaw quivering under his top row of teeth like scared magnets. ‘Anyway,' he began to exit back down the hallway, then turned and leapt at me gently, ‘you like poppies?'

I followed him to the rotting kitchen, I held onto the door frame, to half hide fear. I trusted him. Should I? I didn't care anymore. It didn't matter.

In the kitchen Sheepa rinsed an old cola bottle clear. From under the sink he took a plastic shopping bag and emptied half the little black dots into the cola bottle and filled it again from the tap. The water pipes shuddered under institutional cream walls. He shook the bottle for a while, tilting back his head and looking into my face, calmer and more real than before.

‘What's it do?' I asked.

‘It'll take the hurt out of your eyes.'

I brushed my fingers across my face as if turning diary pages, smearing secrets along my skin, owning them. Before I closed the book and looked away.

Sheepa tightened a sock over the top of the bottle and strained the muddy water into a glass. The grey water didn't dazzle or twinkle in any midday light; it sat as dull as my heart. Launched by his blunt chewed fingers it slid towards me across the flecked bench. I took the glass carefully to my chest and walked back into the room. As I sat against the edge of the foam and let each mouthful bleed down my insides, every nerve ending and muscle lay down its guard. And soon I felt less confused than before.

I am lying on a bed of foam, though my skin knows it as water; it rises to my pores and laps at my ear cavities, muffling the choke of intersecting roads, of voices, of wind. Belly up to the sky where whitewashed clouds let out the blue like venetian blinds. The warmth swims up around my neck and outlines the painlessness of my face,
of me. And from here I am perfectly happy. From here I stay, unwiring this bliss behind eyelids that make pictures and movies. I dream I dream I dream.

In the movies I am there, I know it is me but my face is blurry, and the other people in the movies I know too, but they are also blurry. My cousins are there and my dad too, we're inside the house looking out into the yard where he's chasing a blue tongue around with a shovel. He's jumping and heaving the metal rusted blade into the sandstone and dead garden beds. He's angry, but we're laughing at him. Then he turns towards us, his eyes come into focus and he's crying, but he can't help it. There's blood spitting down one of his legs. He comes up to the window, and now instead of the shovel he's resting on the lawnmower handles, the motor's running still and the noise drives me back to the room, I'm halfway between and he's still crying. I can't stop him from crying. He leans down and pulls a beer bottle top from the flesh of his shin. He's laughing hysterically, as if the possibility of the event is so small, as small as a beer bottle top.

The movie changes and I'm swimming, I'm
always swimming, and Mum is swimming too. We're diving through salted waves, catching our breath, before we realise we needn't breathe. I look toward her but she's not there anymore. And when I open my eyes again I'm in the middle of three lakes, a gutter runs through the centre where I wade. Where I stand feeds the lakes, the shore, the mango tree in the distance, the black cockatoo circling my head. A lone grey kangaroo drinks at the water's edge. When I imagine he is there, when I believe he is there, he looks up at me and stretches back, resting on his tail, displaying all that grey muscle, flesh and fur.

I wake. Again and again.

When I feel trapped walking in my head, solving unsolvable mysteries, I drown, and the releasing surges out of me, pungent flowing vomit, freeing. The drug doesn't recognise me anymore, doesn't recognise that I even exist under its hold.

I witness more spooling movies. Dad has come and gone, as he did. Or would have. I think about when he left, I can't remember why, it torments me; it keeps me awake for days trying to remember. I feel this kind of frenzied serving dish
in my belly; it fires and burns with an aching for my father. There has been fighting, for how long I don't know, it's always just there, in my mind. I ask my brother if he remembers, or if it even matters, but his face is blurred and his mouth has not yet formed. I wonder if I am beginning to understand things, or if I am losing grip, like Mum.

Sheepa entered the room. He gave me two pink notes, his shout for lunch, but I must go to get it. I don't enjoy crossing the busy road to the corner store. Inside, my skin begins to grease, the frying vents seem clogged up and a thick yellow blanket rests at the ceiling. The stench of oily potato and stale fish fills the small shopfront nook. The red-haired woman square-dances around the fryers, dipping a metal basket in and out of the swampy liquid. While her back is turned, I pocket a packet of noodles and a Mars bar. I think she knows, but she needs us and we need her. I promise myself I'll stop stealing, when I'm old enough for Centrelink.

She glares over her glasses at me.

‘Two hamburgers with the lot, thanks.'

I walk outside and dump my body in the chair on the footpath, my back melting into the hot plastic. Even with the bushfires finished,
the Gong is still a fighting city. Smoke from the steelworks competes with the hot air that clings brown orange to the coastline, the haze that has filled my lungs since my first breath at the hospital, the haze that has hung over the backyard of Paradise Parade and singed the dim, glittery nights. To the west, the escarpment traps the grubby air, keeping it from escaping still; the shop's clogged vents work in the same way. I let the warm plastic cradle me, imagining some huge clean openings in the sky that would suck all the shit out. With the heat, you choke on it – you taste the dirt.

I stare at the fragile clouds and loosen my thoughts before my eyes drop focus on the house. And just then my heart fell into the pit of my body, bruising its hard shell. All feeling jolted back into me as two men and a woman enter the house. One is Billy.

How long had it been? I counted a few months as I balanced on the median strip, waiting for the traffic to speed past. I skipped past the tail of a car and into the sunroom as fast as my smile had leapt onto my face. And left. Just as fast.

‘Billy! Where have you been?'

‘Hey!' He turned to the others. ‘This is me little sis,' he slurred, drugged, and staggered into me, throwing his weak arm around my neck. ‘May baby,' he started to hum a tune.
‘May baby.'

I wriggled from his smelly chest and rested against the doorless frame in the hallway entrance. I tried to catch a glimpse of him, but he wasn't there.

‘You're off ya dial, Billy!'

He was humming to himself and shaking his head, a song and a joke carrying on without anyone else. As his hands unwrapped the small package of foil, the others waited to shoot up. Their eyes were all sunken brown and yellow stones, cold. Golf balls bending earth colours, the mud from their veins and lungs and heart spreading what they felt over what they saw, insides had become the outsides and hope was suspended, just beyond view.

I went back to Sheepa's room unnoticed, with more than a door separating us. Placed all my little things together, rearranging them. Little pretty things – a black cockatoo's feather; the postcard of mangoes from Darwin, my pocketknife and a tiny tray of blue shimmer eye shadow.

I rearranged the little things again and dreamed.

Voices drowned under poppies, where everything was slow and smiley.

I woke with the fear of brown and yellow eyes and dragged dead legs to the bathroom to check. A girl was there, I'd never seen her before. She was slumped on the floor. Her clothes fell from her as though shedding themselves in the heat. She was wilting in a puddle of peach-tiled water, a little pool of sweat gathered at her naked hip, where the name ‘2pac' was inscribed in green. She was beautiful.