The End of the World (2 page)

The veterinarian retrieved the thermometer, examined it and shook his head. He stood opposite me across the shiny silver table. As he spoke, he fondled one of the Viscount’s delicate limbs with one hand while stroking his body with the other. I realised this man must truly love the creatures in his care.

‘Normally, an animal with birth defects this severe would not survive. How long have you had it?’

‘Only a few weeks,’ I said.

He shook his head again and squeezed his face into a sympathetic frown.

‘I honestly don’t think it will live much longer. Have you given it a name?’

‘Viscount Ryland Pennington.’

The vet bent his head and leaned in toward the Viscount.

‘Well, little fella,’ he murmured, loudly enough for me to hear. ‘Maybe it would be kinder to let you go, Ryland?’

The vet didn’t look at my face. He was probably used to people crying in his surgery. While I tried to compose myself he kept stroking the Viscount, murmuring reassurances to him.

‘Make it easy on you both, hey?’

‘I can’t do that,’ I said when I had caught my breath.

I lifted the Viscount as gently as I could and laid him back on the silk bed in the box. I paid the vet’s bill at the reception counter and hurried past the golden retriever lunging at the box.

At my front gate I met Denise. She stared at the box as she asked me over for dinner the next week.

‘It’s about time,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe I haven’t had you over yet.’ She put her hand on my arm. ‘I’ll get the kids to bed early. We can have a glass of wine.’ I noticed how thin she was getting.

‘That would be nice,’ I said. I wondered what we would talk about.

Three days later, the Viscount showed no more signs of life. His cool inert body felt different to my touch. I thought he had died, but how could I be sure? I left him in the drawer for another day, then I wrapped him, together with his notes, in silk and plastic and put him in the freezer.

That weekend, my writing group came to the house. One of them was rummaging in the freezer for ice-cubes when the Viscount’s body, wrapped in its shroud, tumbled to the floor. We were sitting at the kitchen table and she turned to us with the package of the Viscount in her hands.

‘Hey, Jules, is this octopus?’ she asked. ‘Are you supposed to wrap it up like this before you freeze it? Maybe that why mine’s always so tough.’

I had thought I would tell the story of the Viscount to the writing group but that day I changed my mind.

‘Yes, you should try it,’ I said.

I got up from my chair, took the Viscount from her hands and put him carefully back in the cold dry freezer.

In a hero’s journey the heroine is supposed to understand the clues. She overcomes obstacles with powers she never knew she had.

No special powers have manifested in me. Although I cared for the Viscount as best I could and tried to understand what I should do, he died. Perhaps my journey is supposed to lead on from here, but I have discovered that I am no heroine. I have no guide, the messenger is dead, and I am weak with grief.

Inheritance

After my brother died I came home from another country, where I had all but forgotten that I ever had a family.

I have been losing my memory for a long time now. Each year another room of my mind is shut down and closed off, like the wings of a mansion where guests have stopped coming. Old friends, events, places, all white sheeted and still, cluster in the recesses of my forgetfulness, only trembling when disturbed by light. Any light, any thought penetrating these dark rooms is painful. The pain is dense and its origin is difficult to locate.

I had to decide what to do with the family house and all of its contents.

I pause at the front gate. I am fifty years old, unkempt, thin, pale. My knees itch as if ants are crawling over them. I bend down to scratch. I wait with my head bowed toward the footpath and my hands ¬resting on my knees. I wait for the tongue of the house to reach out and scoop me up.

The house has been waiting for me to come home. I can feel its sudden interest, a creaking of the joists, a shudder in the walls. The dead inhabitant of the house is waiting to hear my story and to judge me on how I have spent my years away.

The day I arrived to clean up the house, a year after my brother died, I stood outside the gate for a long time.

The house is mine now. I have avoided the cataloguing for a year since I heard that this museum of a home had fallen to me. Inside there will be spiders and mould, but there were spiders and mould even while we lingered inside. My mother and my brother and I lived in the house while it disintegrated around us.

When the house came into my hands, into my arms, I wanted to rent it out to tenants, thinking that new life would drive out the ghosts. But no real estate agent would take the job. Anyone can tell, as soon as they step inside, that this is a house already full of tenants.

A faint voice greets me. My father calls to me from hell. Is that you, sweetie? What have you been doing?

As I stepped inside the house, the forgotten past came alive and tore the darkness from my memories.

He’s got a present for me. Every morning he gives me a present, pretending each time that it will be a surprise. I take the small bag of nuts and sweets, kiss his withered cheek and run out of the room, calling goodbye. I thank him every time. I feign surprise and delight every time. Children know what they must do. He has always given me sweets. Sweets for my sweet. Caramels and walnut creams, rocky road, liquorice, peanut brittle, soft-¬centre chocolates. Every day a handful of sweets. My teeth come out of my gums already rotten.

The sweets never taste quite right, so I cannot pass them out at school anymore. Despite the strange taste, my friends want the sweets because the colour and the glistening sugar tempt their short memories. But I am embarrassed to hand the sweets around, so I huddle in the corner sucking off the bitter outer layer and forcing down each one. I’m eating his medicine. The sweets taste of sulphur. They are bitter sweets. They smell of illness because he hoards them in his medicine drawer. I eat them anyway.

He holds out sweets in his palm. I take them to school. The teacher says to me in the playground, ‘You’re a lucky girl always to have sweets, aren’t you?’

Some things became clear.

My gaunt father watches me on the running field. He has his camera ready for when I win the race. There is no doubt that I will win the race. If I lost the race, he would not be there. So I win the race, I win every race, I win every contest, I excel at everything. Then he dies, and I never want to win again.

The fear is gone. I am relieved not to be winning, and yet a part of me takes over his role. I am relieved not to have to win, and I despise myself each time I lose. Now that I have spent so much time refusing to do anything right, I wonder whether I could win even if I tried.

Some things I will never understand.

Two ambulance men carried the old man away on a stretcher. He was naked, skeletal, a towel was draped across his groin, his left hand trailed on the ground. With each breath, his ribs sprang out like two large hands around his body, then caved back into his chest. We stood around silently and watched him ride away. No one went with him.

The whiteness of his naked body left an after¬image in my eyes. A long pale form appeared behind my closed eyelids but, like a flat smooth river stone, the form had no features. As if I had already forgotten the details of him.

I had always believed in ghosts, especially ghosts who tell stories.

Even before my father died the rooms of this house harboured ghosts. They were not the ghosts of people,¬ but the ghosts of thoughts and deeds. They were ghosts born of dread. He had given birth to a new ghost each time he neared death. For seven years he wandered through the passageways of dying, and five times when he approached the last door he tricked the waiting doorman with another ghoul wrenched from his bitterness. When he was finally dragged through the door, he left the house crowded with his creations.

The day we heard he would not come back, his room was as dark as ever, protected by the drawn blinds. In my childhood nightmares the room had been full of unborn children and cripples and half-human things. They cavorted with the spooks under the bed, making odd choking noises through the night like the sounds of stifled laughter. Now the bedside lamp was still alight, and the tangled bedclothes formed a human shape.

He had often described to me his terror that one day, when the door of his bedroom had accidentally blown shut, a fire would start. No one would hear his shouts. Flames would take the bedclothes, then the posts, then leap across to his hair while he lay unable to move. I used to picture him burning, his head wreathed with fire and his face dancing with rage as the beasts under the bed reached up to take him. I imagined not being able to hear his shouts.

On the first night in my old bed, I had the same dream that I had so many times in that bed. When I woke, I wondered why I had chosen to sleep in that particular room.

As soon as I open my dream eyes, the yellow floral curtain begins to move. Just a flutter. The flowers are delphiniums, strange yellow delphiniums, painted huge to please a baby’s eye. The curtain starts to swell. I look away, examine the other shades of darkness and find nothing.

The door swings open and light bores through my eyelids, through my eyes, into my brain. My father is shouting. I can’t understand what he’s saying. He moves two steps inside the room, still shouting his unintelligible accusations. I slip further under the bedclothes. He stops shouting. He steps back out of the room, the light snaps off. I look back to the window and see that the curtain is still.

When I looked through the photograph album, I realised that life in our family after he died became slovenly, in exactly the way he would have hated.

After my mother stopped any pretence at maintaining the house, the paint peeled off the weatherboards and the stumps sank. The plaster crazed like an ancient fresco, webtrails of smoke darkened the walls, the bathroom blackened with mould. Torn blinds fringed the windows and the garden grew wild, aside from one rose bush that my mother tended like a child.

When I turned fourteen, I started smoking cigarettes. Every night my mother and my brother and I sat in separate rooms and sucked the poison from the cigarettes with all our strength. Clouds of smoke rolled out of the windows on hot evenings. The house was on fire. We were burning ourselves up, puffing until our chests ached, as if we wanted to self-immolate in a monstrous family gesture. The early morning hours were filled with our coughs and asthmatic wheezes.

It took time to sift through everything.

He has been dead for thirty years, yet his willpower holds the house together, keeps the odd stripe of paint sticking to the walls and seals the dust in the plaster. His will emanates from the bedroom where he festered, a creative man with no art but the manipulation of his family. Although the bookcase in the lounge room is crammed with expensive books on modernism and the impressionists, he never actually painted pictures. Instead, we were the failed canvasses he felt he must attack again and again with his brush.

Black water runs out of the tap. The water was always tinged with rust from the pipes that were laid in the twenties. Now it is black and spurts out noisily as if the tap is having a fit. The kitchen shudders and moans with the effort of pushing the water around. Black water pouring endlessly out of the tap. Perhaps something has died in one of the pipes or dirt has seeped in through rust holes. The refrigerator still works. The stove splutters but makes a flame. It’s not so long, really, since people lived here. My brother stayed here for years expecting me to come home and demand my half of the inheritance.

There are school reports and LP records and bottles of old medicine, the detritus of family life. Photographs of me fill a whole drawer. I place the photos in piles according to year, sort them into good photos and bad photos and choose a couple to save.

The burning photographs made flakes of black ash that floated above me for a while, then settled on the garden like black petals, like tiny letters of condolence.

As I stand next to the incinerator, feeding the fire, the smoke billows up and into my nostrils. I sneeze. One small sneeze, and another and another until I am helpless in a wave of uncontrollable sneezes. Tears run down my cheeks and smear the ash that has caught on my skin. By the time I stop sneezing my face is streaked with black and the photographs have burned to a pile of white ash.

After four days, the water from the tap began to run clear. I drank to quench the terrible thirst that had overtaken me.

It takes a moment to understand that the babbling voice I can hear is my own. As if a ghost inside me is talking. She is telling stories I’ve kept in the dark all my life. I can’t stop her. I wonder, Where did this tenacious woman come from? Why does she beat this tattoo on the walls of my heart?

Save Our School

Norm Stevens Senior tells me I’ll never get that truck off my land. He says it’s too old, been there too long, the hoist will try to lift the thing and it will break apart into red stones of rust.

‘Leave it,’ he says. ‘Let it rust away. One day you’ll look and it won’t be there anymore.’

He gives me a sideways glance.

‘Like husbands,’ he says. ‘You look away and when you look back they’re gone, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So have you heard from the bastard?’ he asks.

‘Nope.’

‘And you’re getting by all right? For money?’

‘I’ve got more money now than when he was here.’

We both laugh.

‘Now Loretta, you know I can take the kids for a night if you need some time off.’

‘I might take you up on that. I’ve got a prospect. A biker, but a nice one, not a loser. On a Harley, no less.’

‘A Harley?’ he says, raising his eyebrows. Whenever he raises his eyebrows the crusty skin on his forehead wrinkles and he reaches up to touch it.

‘You should have that looked at, Norm,’ I say.

‘Yeah, yeah, and I should give up the spare parts work and get out of the sun too.’ His arm gestures around his junkyard.

Some of the machinery is so bent and broken you can’t even tell what it used to be for. In the centre of the yard is a lemon tree, the only greenery in sight. It always has lemons. I’m sure I know what Norm does to help it along, but I don’t ask. He’s got four guard dogs too, tied up around the yard, vicious snarling things. As if anyone would want to steal any of this crap.

‘Well, I’d better pick up the kids,’ I say.

I don’t want to pick up the kids. I want to send them to an orphanage and buy myself a nice dress and learn to live like I used to, before I turned into the old scrag I am now.

‘Don’t you worry about that truck,’ Norm says, patting me on the arm. ‘It’ll just go back into the land.’

I get into the car, pump the accelerator like I’m at the gym and turn the key three times before the engine fires. I should have that looked at, I think. There’s half a kilo of sausages on the seat beside me and I realise they’ve been sitting in the sun for half an hour already. When I unwrap the paper and have a sniff there’s a funny sulphur smell. They’ll cook up all right, I tell myself, and I gun the Holden and screech in a u-turn onto the road. I can’t get used to this huge engine–every time I take off I sound like a pack of hoons at Bathurst.

It’s 3:30 already and Jake and Melissa will be waiting at the school gate when I get there, ready to jump in and whine about how everyone else’s mum always gets there before I do. Maybe I’ll drop them off at the orphanage.

At the school gate the kids are both standing with their hands on their hips. I wonder if they got that from me. Old scrag standing with her hands on her hips, pursing her thin lips, squinting into the sun. You could make a statue of that. It would look like half the women in this town. Dust and a few plastic bags swirling around the statue’s feet, the tail-lights of the husband’s car receding into the distance. They should cast it in bronze and put it in the foyer of Centrelink.

‘Mum, we have to have four sheets of coloured cardboard for the project tomorrow.’

‘All right.’

‘And me too I have to have a lead pencil and I don’t want bananas in my lunch anymore they stink.’

‘All right.’

As I steer the great car down the highway toward home I have a little dream. I’ll arrive and swing into the driveway and there, sitting next to the verandah, will be a shiny maroon Harley. I won’t dare to look but out of the corner of my eye I’ll see a boot resting on the step, maybe with spurs on it. Then I’ll slowly lift my head and he’ll be staring at me like George Clooney stared into J-Lo’s eyes in Out of Sight and I’ll take a deep breath and say to him, ‘Can you hang on five minutes while I drop the kids at the orphanage?’

A bag of lemons is sitting on the verandah. Norm must have left them while we were at the newsagent.

‘Who left these?’ Jake says.

‘Norm,’ I say.

‘How do you know?’

‘There’s oil on the bag.’

I bought Norm a cake of Solvol once. Delivered it to the junkyard all wrapped in pretty pink paper with a bow. He rang to thank me.

‘I think you’re insulting me,’ he said.

‘It’s for your own good, Norm.’

‘You’re a minx. If I was thirty years younger...’

‘Fifty more like,’ I told him, ‘before you’d get those paws on me.’

When the kids are finally settled in their rooms doing their homework I get on the phone for the usual round of begging.

‘Are you coming to the meeting tomorrow?’

‘Oh, Loretta, I’m sorry, I completely forgot. I’ve made other plans.’

I can imagine Helen’s plans. They’ll involve a cask of white and six changes of clothes before she collapses on the bed in tears and starts ringing her friends, me, asking why she can’t find a man. Is she too old, has she lost her looks? It helps to actually leave the house, I often remind her.

‘The grade three teacher’s coming. And Brianna’s offered to mind all the kids at her place. She must have hired a bouncer.’

‘He’s told you he’s coming?’

‘Yeah, he left a message on my machine,’ I lie.

So Helen’s in. I herd up seven others with more lies and false promises, then I put the sausages on. Sure enough, the sulphur smell fades when they start to burn. I used to like cooking quiche and fancy fried rice and mud cake. Gourmet, like on the telly, the boyfriend boasted to his mates. Then we get married and it’s, ‘Listen, darl, I wouldn’t mind a chop for a change.’ Now the kids think gourmet is pickles on your sandwich. They won’t even look at a sun-dried tomato. Last time I tried that, Jake picked them all out of the spaghetti sauce and left them lined up like bits of red chewed meat on the side of the plate. ‘Gross,’ he said, and I had to agree, seeing them like that.

Standing at the stove, rolling the sausages in the pan and stirring the potatoes in the boiling water, my face warms in the steam and it’s time for another fantasy moment. The pudge has magically fallen from my hips and I’m wearing a long, slinky silk dress. I’m in the function room of the golf course, tossing my newly blond-streaked hair and full of ennui or some other French feeling at these boring wealthy men crowding around me. Then there’s a draught from the doorway and I don’t even have to look–I can hear the jingle of spurs.

The meeting’s in the small room at the Neighbourhood House because the Church of Goodwill had already booked the large room. We’re sitting pretty much on top of each other, trying to balance cups of tea and Scotch Finger biscuits on our knees, except for Maxine, who’s supposed to take the minutes.

I thought I’d made it up, but the grade three teacher has come and Helen’s paralysed with excitement and terror. She’s wearing enough perfume to spontaneously combust and in this tiny room the smell’s so overwhelming that Maxine has to swing the door open. Then the noise from the meeting next door starts up.

‘Yes!’ they all shout. ‘Yes! I do, I do!’

‘Well, I don’t,’ Maxine says, and she swings the door half shut so that we’re dizzy with perfume but still having to shout over the frantic clapping of people being saved next door. Maxine shrugs.

I give the list of apologies and welcome everyone who’s come, introducing the grade three teacher in case the others don’t know him. Helen’s gone pink and glistening like a baby fresh out of the bath. She’ll have a seizure if she’s not careful. I can’t see the attraction. The teacher’s five foot four, stocky, and always says ‘at the end of the day.’

‘At the end of the day,’ he says when I introduce him, ‘I am totally committed to this cause.’

Just in case, I look down at his feet, but no spurs. I read out the list of agenda items. Brenda sighs loudly.

‘Do we have to do all this agenda crap? And the motions? I motion, you motion. My Mark’s doing motions you wouldn’t believe and I have to be home by nine in case I need to take him to Emergency.’

‘Yes, we do,’ I say, ‘because we’re trying to be bloody official. And as you well know, an emergency department that closes at ten in a town half an hour away is one of the reasons we’re here. Soon this town will have no services for a hundred miles.’

‘Oh, yes ma’am.’

I roll my eyes. Maxine rolls her eyes. For a minute I think of us all rolling our eyes like a bunch of lunatics in the asylum and I almost cheer up.

‘Item one. I’ve written a letter to our local member about the closure of the school.’ I pause for the inevitable joke about members which, to my amazement, doesn’t come. ‘We need everyone who has kids in the school to sign.’

‘It’ll never work,’ Brenda says.

‘Does anyone know how to drain the oil from a sump?’ Kyleen pipes up.

Only another half an hour, I think, and then I can pick up the kids from Brianna’s, drop them at the orphanage and drive straight down to Melbourne. With the experience I’ve got, I’ll land a good job in a centre for adults with attention deficit disorder.

When I pull up in the Holden at Brianna’s the kids run to the front door, looking pleased to see me. They’re way too quiet in the back seat. They must have done something horrible.

‘So did you have a good time?’ I ask. I speed up to catch the amber light and the car roars like a drunken trucker. I can’t make out exactly what Melissa says, but I might have heard the word fight. I think back. Were they limping when they got into the car? Was there blood? I can’t remember anything like that so I turn on the radio and keep driving on the dark highway, listening to the soothing sound of a voice calling Race Seven of the trots, something I’ve learned to love since the radio got stuck on this station.

‘Mum?’ Melissa says as we pull into the unsurprisingly Harley-free driveway.

‘Yes, sweetie?’

‘I don’t ever want to leave this house.’

‘I thought you wanted to live in a hundred-room mansion with ten servants and a personal homework attendant?’

‘Nup.’

‘I know what it is–you love what I’ve done with the place.’

‘Mum, shut up. I’m serious. If Dad sends a letter and we’ve moved we won’t get it.’

I want to believe he’ll send a letter–to his children, at least.

‘Well, that’s settled. We’re staying,’ I say.

When we get inside the kids brush their teeth without a single protest and climb into bed.

‘You OK, Jakie?’ I ask as I lean down to kiss him goodnight.

‘Brianna and her boyfriend had a big fight,’ he whispers. ‘I think he hit her.’

I kiss him twice, then again.

‘I’m sure she’s all right,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll call her tomorrow. You go to sleep now.’

‘I don’t want bananas in my lunch.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it. Bananas stink,’ I say, and turn out the light.

Next morning as I’m packing bananas into their lunchboxes I realise I forgot to thank Norm for the lemons.

I drop into the yard on the way back from the shops. He’s down the back of the block with three other blokes, all of them standing in a line with their arms folded staring at the body of an old tractor. This would be the matching statue. Bloke standing, feet apart, arms folded, staring at a piece of broken machinery. No idea how to fix it. We could put Him and Her statues either side of the highway coming into Gunapan.

After they’ve stared at the tractor body in silence for ten minutes, Norm sees me and ambles up.

‘Don’t tell me you’re going to sell something?’ I say.

‘Not bloody likely. Every month these three are here with some new scheme for making money.’

‘None of them happen to ride a Harley?’

He doesn’t even bother answering, just nods his head at their ute on the road. We step inside his shed for a cuppa. The radio’s on the racing station.

‘Harlequin Dancer made a good run from fourth in Race Seven last night,’ I say.

‘You need a new car,’ Norm answers, handing me a cup, covered in grease, and a paper towel to wipe it with. ‘Sorry I didn’t get to the meeting, luv.’

‘The school’s not your problem,’ I say.

‘Course it’s my problem. It’s everybody’s bloody problem.’

We drink our tea. The three blokes wave as they pass the shed. There’s a protest at Randwick in Race Two.

‘I’ve got money on that horse,’ Norm says. He turns up the volume.

‘Which one?’

‘The one that’ll buy you a bottle of bubbly if it wins the protest. Long odds. Very long odds. Bring me luck, Loretta.’

The day’s starting to heat up and blowies are banging against the tin roof of the shed. Norm picks up the trannie and holds it to his ear. I look out at the heat shimmering over the piles of junk. Norm’s touching his crusty forehead as he listens for the outcome of the protest. He must win against the odds sometimes, I think–otherwise why bother betting?

‘Thank you for your letter of January 9. I fully understand the concerns you have expressed and I would like to take this opportunity to explain how these concerns are being addressed by your Government.’