Swallow the Air (5 page)

A little river of foam left the edge of her lips where she spoke.

Blue roses

Burnt

She had no eyes.

‘Please, Sheepa, come here.' I squashed his face together and ground my teeth.
‘Pleeeeaase!'

He dove up as if thrust out of nightmare, the others followed. In the bathroom he ran the shower cold and dumped her melting body into
the bathtub. She had no eyes. She did not wake. He slapped her white cheek firmly but gently. It remained white. She had no eyes. She did not wake. I stepped back helpless as they dragged her dead-weighted, almost corpse out through the sunroom and down the steps. Billy was holding her legs. He glanced up at me as he shuffled backwards. He was vacant. He had eyes. He did not wake.

I followed them down the path, past the blurring traffic and to the train station stairs. I'm confused. I have eyes, no mouth.

They disposed of her like evidence and the train took the blank girl along the lines and away from the empty platform. Sleepless sleepers.

I did not know any of them; I did not know my brother.

Back at the house I placed the little pretty things in my bag. I waited at the edge of the new motorway, in the stirring exhaust pillows, waiting to go to wherever.

The truckie was heading straight to the Supercharge Raceway in Darwin. Melbourne to the Top End. He said he never usually went the coast road, but the bushfires were spread out west and this was the only way. He said that from here onwards there'd be less traffic, he said it to reassure me, but I didn't mind either way. He'd been there before, Darwin; it was where he'd met his missus. He told me about it as we drove. Diving in and out of his stories of the raceway and of a sweating community that dangles on the edge of the Arafura Sea.

A big country town, Pete said. His arms grabbed the top of the steering wheel as he arched his back, stretching. ‘Yep, nice people and good pubs, and good fishing of course.'

To see the ocean disappearing in the long passenger mirrors, seeing the wide blue ribs of the coast fall away beneath the ridge, let me finally breathe. I thought about us putting the girl on the train, her slumped body, out of it. I wondered if she was dead, if she'd ever wake from that sleep among the sleepers, or dream a life away.

I wondered if Billy ever would too. I wanted to forget him, his dead eyes looking through me as he shuffled the girl away, shuffling himself further from me.

On the motorway cars had rushed by me faster than ever until finally a truck dropped its gears as it passed me and waited, rumbling, further up the stretch. I ran up to the passenger side where Pete had flung open the door and smiled. Not a creepy smile at all, a fat teddy bear smile full of metal-filled cavities that made me feel safe.

In the back of the truck there were three Supercharge cars, which were to be raced that weekend. Pete said then he'd like to just rest his voice box for a while, he liked to drive in silence, said he's got four kids at home and it had been a long while since he'd had time to think, said if I didn't mind, could we just listen to music and
mind our own beeswax. I told him I'd like that too, and I did.

Day eventually gave way to night, where the road and the sky faded into a mask of sparklers, scattering stars and headlight scars across the hours. We drove right through Pete's box set of country classics, and his energy drinks, right into the third repeat where I began to memorise the lyrics.

He wanted to get there by tomorrow arvo, for the fights before the races. Said it'd make it the best weekend of his life if we got there on time, said he needed to keep awake. As we passed through the long stretch from the sugar cane fields to the wheat stalks, he took the little bag of white and with his bank card against the logbook crushed it out so that it was smooth. He lined it up in skinny rows, sucked each line up his nose and grunted his way through to daylight. I lay half asleep in the cab's bunk bed, as suspension collapsed over pockets of repaired tar, counting his mutterings.

A memory slipped in between the sheets and me. Dad is there. We're at the side of our old house. He's crouching beside Mum's racer with a spanner;
he's tightening the bolts on the wheel rims. With one hand he holds the bike frame above the cement and with the other spins the wheel round. The red and blue buttons slide up and down the spokes. He looks over to me, smiles.

Perfect.

By the time I opened my eyes against the day; the sunrise had already shifted above the top of the cab. My muscles ached, as my bones stabbed against them with the truck's sway. I felt crook, my insides abandoned, like a hulled out apple. Just the skin to cry through, little tears welled at my pores. It was the poppies. Opium sweats, Sheepa called it, the morning after a night without them. He would boil up a pot of pineapple juice, cook it so it was warm and add some spumante to knock that shit feeling out of us. Opium bones, muscle ache and nausea. If I could make it through this, I knew I wouldn't miss that feeling again. If I could make it through.

‘Mornin,' Pete said through his mercury teeth that matched his earlobe full of metal rings. His hands still rounding the steering
wheel, his eyes fixed back on the moving road, the same looking road as yesterday. The only difference was maybe the dust, embracing the road a few shades redder. Heading towards the blushing Top End.

Pete said there wasn't long to go. A quick feed stop and we should be there by the arvo. He shouted me baked beans, fried eggs and bacon and a cup of hot coffee, for the road. The grease slipped out the edges of my lips before I caught it with my tongue. Meals like these could either cure the pain or feed it. I waited.

The day disappeared again in half-sleep and twanging banjos from the speakers. I asked if I could turn the sound down a bit. He said it was fine; he was getting sick of it anyway. He didn't take his eyes off my hand and forearm as I reached out for the stereo.

‘You got really olive skin? Ya parents, are they European or something?'

‘Na.'

‘What then? Ya got something. My missus, she's Maltese. Skin like yours too.'

‘My Mum was Aboriginal.'

‘No shit? You don't look like an Abo.'

‘My old man isn't though; his family are from the First Fleet and everything. Rich folk they were, fancy folk from England.'

‘I hate Pommies,' Pete said, and back in the music and the silence, I wondered if they really were from England after all.

I couldn't wait to find Dad and ask.

Pete points at the little green shields on the side of the highway, they have a number and a letter or two above the number. He says that sign will tell me how far away we are from where we're going. The next one that I spot has the letter D and a 98 written underneath. ‘How long does that take?'

‘Depends if there's any towns to go through matey, but probably around an hour and a bit I reckon. But we're going to take a detour, a pit stop, kid. Local attraction – only Fridays, won't see it again. You'll love it...'

And soon the highway forks and we drop gears onto a skinnier road that leaves the white paint outline behind. We drive a fair while down where the trees have begun to overgrow the crumbly
bitumen edges. I almost start to panic until the side of the road opens up to a field of parked four-wheel-drive utes and troop carriers. A hand-painted sign dangles from the back of a tin shed. Palm Creek Rodeo.

The truck's gears take their final dropdown, hissing and shuddering the cab, as Pete drives over to the end of the field and stops. We climb out onto the steps and fling ourselves down.

We begin to walk across the jumbled rows of cars, when the sun falls just below the tree line and a cool wind catches my nape. I loosen my jumper from where it's tied around my waist.

Pete's pink skin is camouflaged among the sea of red dirt cars as we near the side of the shed. A big wind pushes its way beneath the four-wheel-drives and beckons at my legs. The boundary of eucalypt trees cry out above clawing desert oaks, as they perch themselves on the land. A big gust flings the trees backward and then forward like the concave of lungs. The air whooshes about the trucks and whistles deep in my ears, I throw my head up to the sky's bellowing.

Grey gums inhale. Pausing breath. A slow thudding noise replaces the sky; it drives over the
rodeo fence as I pull the jumper over my head, the hood crowning my face.

What I saw was not meant for my eyes.

A jawbone crunches under a slice of bare knuckles. Bloodied eyeballs throw blank expressions. Mouths fling spittle streamers about the dirt red ring. Frantic, finger-bitten punches claw tangled in the shiny skin.

I hear Pete's voice in my head,
the fights before the races.
I can't take my eyes from the horror, the osmosis of blood and blood beneath the dust-flung dusk. Bones crack under the fighter's grated ribs, his oars of the dinghy swinging – slipping to the ground. The fighter thrusts a knee in between the other fighter's lung cage. It caves him skyward like a skinny stray cat. All the men roar back. Fierce men. Black men and white men, separated by only skin, only by skin until it rips open and the red blood and red dirt become the same, same red brute. The smell chokes me, fighting, of Aunty's Tooheys Old, unwashed sheets, marinated, raw beef. The fighter who's down, half naked and pissing his pants and pleading, is taken under the armpits and dragged from the ring, leaving the short ditch of urine and blood across the ground.
And as another fighter clears the fence, I notice the money-shuffling hands. The stink of bourbon leaks across the fifty-odd men and the few bleached heads of tattooed women. Leaking from belly laughter and sing-along heaving breath.

I wrench my eyes from the blood, and up to the faces, the spectators, not like I'd imagined rodeo men, more hard shiny faces and no cream creased shirts. They wear big hats though, guilty of some principled crime underneath their wide brims.

Some things you never
ever
forget. The way your dead mother used to smile. The way sunrise flashes against the tabletop of the ocean. My brother's scared eyes looking up from the kitchen floor.

Some things stay with you, even if you manage to prise them out of your history, they somehow come marching back with a slung shotgun to blow away anything you've managed to build. To destroy your world, the world that's not real but you wish it was.

And I'll never ever forget that day, at the rodeo
fights, and all the days that that day had brought with it. The day that I found my father. There he was, watching the men bleed faces. There he was, Dad. The day I truly faced him, at his side, not the stranger I'd wished for, or made myself imagine. He was the monster I'd tried to hide.

He had a hand like a claw, so full of engorged veins and leather red welted skin, so strong and like his face that hung mirroring the ravaged. How could I forget him? His fingers slung over the cigarette as he sucked from his lips that were pressed close against his forefinger and thumb. His neck contorted against the inhaling charred breath. He hunched over the whole habitual scene like he always had, down at the flame and across the room. That look, that exact face. That was his anger face.

I remembered now, when that anger face became his always face and the world ceased to be real, to be able to be understood, so I had left it behind. I couldn't remember the endings to the memories of him. But here they were laid bare – the bores of him that I had hidden. Exposed for the fluid truth to punch through.