The Eye of the Sheep (19 page)

‘Yes, Mr Ashworth. Yes, yes, I will. It’s ham, Mr Ashworth. It’s ham and pickle.’

I sat under the shelter shed and ate my ham and pickle. Mrs Stratham crossed the grounds on yard duty. She looked at me with her black balls for eyes and she saw straight through my skin with her marine ability – all of my days and all the information in one look.

I couldn’t swallow. I sat with a lump of ham and pickle obstructing my passage. When Mrs Stratham got to the other side, I spat out the lump, then I ran behind the bins. I stayed there after the bell rang and everyone went back to class; Mr Napper would never notice. They were one thing and I was another. ‘Nobody is like you, Jimmy, you are my one and only, the most special boy in the world,’ said Mum. I waited for Mrs Stratham to finish yard duty and go back inside. The hardest thing to do without Mum was wait.
Wait wait wait. Wait wait wait. Wait wait wait. Wait wait wait.
When I waited my cells vibrated so fast they reached boiling point. I had to move to cool them down.

I came out from behind the bins and I saw that the schoolyard was empty and that there was room to run. I got going from fence to fence. When I reached the posts I gave them a tap with my hand. Powered by the same force that was held in the crossing
points between lines, I was about to go faster than the speed of light. There was visible light, heating houses and turning leaves green and helping the human being to see – and then there was me! Nobody could hold me back, not the fastest and most special boy in the world, Jimmy Flick! I ran so fast – fence to bench to fence to post to toilets to table to fence to bench – that I tore through the barriers of sound and light. My cells split from each other; I had no core, my limbs and fingers and head were blasted into space. I was everywhere, spread thin.

Mr Ashworth came running. He pulled the pieces together, jamming my hands back onto my arms and my feet back onto my ankles. My lungs were in his hands. He held them still so that the air could reach the ventricular.
Tell me what happened, talk to me, explain it, can you tell me, can you say it, how did it happen, Jimmy?

When I tried to speak all the words wanted to get to the front at the same time, like runners in a race. But for Mr Ashworth, whose son I was not, I tried. ‘Mr Ash, Mr Ash –’

‘Ashworth,’ he interrupted me.

‘Ashworth, Ashworth – Mr Ashworth . . .’

‘Slow down, Jimmy, take a deep breath and just tell me.’

I did what he said. I sucked oxygen through my mouth and down into my air passage until every cell got a portion. Oxygen was the glue, binding me together.

‘That’s it, Jimmy. Now what happened?’

‘Mr Ash, Ashworth, I ran, I had to run, I had to run. I am very fast very fast, Mr Ashworth, very fast. Very special. I first did straight lines, then circles, very fast circles, Mr Ashworth. I was fast, I hid, I hid and waited. I waited I waited I waited . . .’

‘Jimmy, slow down . . .’

Every one of my words had their eye on the finishing line and there was no stopping them now. ‘I ran, I hid, I waited I
ran, I – I – I – enemy territory, I told my – my mum, I told her, I always tell her. Mr Ash, do you know Samantha Billmore? She is missing. Missing, Mr Ashworth, missing. Can’t be found, not by anyone.’

Mr Ashworth shook his head. ‘Oh, Jim, what are we going to do with you?’

‘How was it, love?’ Mum asked me at the gate. ‘Jimmy, was school okay?’ She ran her hand through my hair.

‘Enemy territory,’ I told her.

‘Oh dear,’ she said.

‘Oh dear,’ I said.

We started to walk.

‘Did anything happen?’

Pelicans flew in loops over our heads, and I mirrored them on land. ‘Hot chips and
Doctor Whoooooooooo
!’ I shouted as I flew.

That night I woke up and heard Merle Haggard singing ‘My Favorite Memory’ from the sitting room. Dad was back! He was back! My heart raced. I didn’t want to see him straightaway – I just wanted to lie there with my heart racing, knowing he was home. I closed my eyes and made a picture of him in his black recliner; he was wearing his work vest and nodding his head to the music. Bill Philby had given him his job back and the rust was waiting for him. It would never run out, productivity would never be low, the flame from the refinery pipe would never die.

When the song ended I lay in the gap and held my breath, before the next one came. When Merle started to sing ‘Love Will Find You’ I got out of bed. As I stepped into the hall I heard
crying between Merle’s words like an instrument he had never played before – one made from water and a pipe.

I went to the sitting room and peered around the doorway. The lamp was on and it wasn’t the back of Dad’s head in the recliner, it was Mum’s, the skin of her wide arms pale against the black leather. Her head was in her hands and she was crying.

I stood in the doorway, squinting, my eyes unused to the light. Where was Dad? I looked around the room but I couldn’t see him. I even looked in the places he’d never fit – above the blades of the ceiling fan, under the fringed shade of the lamp, beneath the couch – places I
knew
he’d never be. Mum was the only one in the room and she was crying, her shoulders rocking to Merle’s tune.

I blinked and rubbed my eyes.
Dad’s recliner was using my mother as a transmitter, sending its tears through her and into the atmosphere.

‘Mum?’ I said.

She turned around to me, her eyes red, her face wet with the tears that had been pushed out of her eye-pipes. ‘Jimmy, what are you doing out of bed?’ She wiped her sleeve over her face.

‘Is Dad coming back, Mum?’

‘Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy . . .’ She heaved herself out of the chair, sniffing and pulling her blue dressing gown around her tight. ‘Come here, love,’ she said, turning down Merle.

‘Mum, is he?’ I asked. ‘Is he coming back?

‘Oh, love. Your father . . . your father loves you. He couldn’t . . . couldn’t trust himself. Not after what he did to you.’

‘But is he coming home?’

She shook her head. ‘No, my love, no. No, he’s not. Oh love . . . Your dad . . .’ She was fighting the sounds of crying. ‘Your dad is . . . he’s . . . ashamed. I don’t expect anyone to
understand. He loves you, Jimmy. Robby too. He loves you both.’ She took me in her arms and she hugged me so tight that soon I wasn’t on the outside of her blue gown, I was on the inside of it. I could feel her tears, charged by the power of the recliner, forcing their way through my pores, stinging as they entered. The tears travelled my network, searching for a pathway but were unable to find one. They were trapped in hidden pools in my system, stagnant.

The next day when we got to the school gates Mum said, ‘Okay, Jimmy, ready to go?’

I looked up at the school. ‘Enemy territory,’ I said.

Mum frowned. ‘Oh, Jimmy, is it really that bad?’

‘It’s really that bad,’ I said. I turned to go but she grabbed my hand.

‘Bugger it,’ she said. ‘Come on, love.’

‘Where are we going, Mum?’

‘You can come to work with me,’ she said, pulling me along. ‘If Mr Barker makes a fuss I’ll tell him to make his own spotted dick.’

I gave my mum a ten-point smile and we walked away from enemy territory.

Mum wore her Westlake apron on the bus to save time. ‘It’s
go go go
once I get cooking,’ she said, tying the strings into a bow.

When we got to Westlake Mum took me out to the courtyard where seniors sipped tea on chairs made of hard white lace.

‘Hello, sweetheart, you’re late,’ said Gordon, tapping his watch at Mum. ‘I’ve been waiting with bated breath.’ Gordon
was one of the seniors who’d been there the longest. Whenever he saw Mum it crushed his valves so the blood couldn’t pump through. If he didn’t take medication to keep them open, his brain would starve when she left the building. Gordon ate everything Mum cooked.

‘Well you can unbate your breath, Gordon, because I’m here – and so is Jimmy. Keep an eye on him for me while I’m in the kitchen, will you?’ she said.

Gordon raised his teacup to me as if it was a beer. I raised my fist back at him as if it was a teacup.

After Mum left I walked up and down the edges of the courtyard, my feet along the gutter. I touched my toes to my heels, keeping my feet in a straight line, up and down, up and down, and not once did I fall. It was better than school.

‘Aren’t you tired of that, son? You’re sending me silly just watching,’ Gordon said. ‘How many times is that now?’

‘Who’s counting, Gordon? Who’s counting?!’ I sang back, putting a hop in my step.

Mum was standing over the big stoves in the dining room, stirring the giant pots, and ladling up the chicken soup when Gordon came up to her. ‘Paula, if you weren’t taken I swear I’d make you mine.’

Mum’s face was pink and shining from the steam. ‘Oh, Gordon, I’m too young for you – you’d never keep up.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ said Gordon. ‘Susan is driving us to the Point Cook bathhouse in the minibus today. Want to come?’

‘I’ve got Jimmy,’ Mum said.

‘So? Be good for him too. An adventure.’ Gordon winked at me where I sat at the bench finishing my banana custard.

Delia came and stood beside Gordon. ‘Come on, Paula, come with us. Do you good.’

‘What about the dinner?’ said Mum.

‘Bugger the dinner,’ said Delia. ‘There’s plenty of time for dinner. Bring the lad. It will be fun.’

‘Bugger the dinner, Mum! Bugger the dinner!’

‘Now look what you’ve started,’ said Mum. But she was smiling. We were going to the bathhouse.

‘Do I have to take a bath?’ I asked Gordon, who was sitting in front of us on the minibus.

Gordon turned around to me, his face between the seats. ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, Jim. That’s the only rule I follow.’

‘I like that rule, Gordon, I like that rule
a lot
.’ I rested back in my seat beside Mum. On one side was the cold of the window, rain dripping down, on the other side my mum leaning against me, warmth flowing through her streams.

Soon Susan stopped the bus outside a grey building with a dome. The seniors took a long time to deport; parts of them were broken. Each time the machine copied itself it made another mistake in the cells.

Mum lent Delia a helping hand as she came down the bus steps. I ran around the bus, touching the lights, touching the bumper, touching the mudguard. ‘Look at him go,’ said Delia. ‘What a rocket.’

Inside the bathhouse people spoke a different language and held branches that they whipped against each other’s backs, leaving pink leaf marks. ‘Can I have a go, Mum?’ I asked her.

‘No one’s hitting me with any branch,’ she said. ‘See if Gordon will let you give him a whack.’

‘I took enough punishment in two wars for that nonsense,’ he said, looking at the branch hitters as if they were enemy soldiers.

Mum and me and the seniors went into the steam room. Everyone else wore towels but Mum and me only took off our shoes. We sat in the steam and Mum leaned back as it rose up around us, hissing and wet. It carried our sweat up the walls and into the pipes and out to sea. The grapes and vines on Mum’s dress clung to her legs, arms and chest. I held on to her hand in my shorts and singlet and the two of us joined a dream of heat and steam and water and it was just the rest Mum needed.

Afterwards we sat on long chairs and looked out the windows at the ocean, grey and chopping and deep, made up of all the drips that came down the walls of the steam room. Everything was joined.

Gordon sat on the very end of his chair and rubbed Mum’s foot, his back bent, his legs thin with networks of tiny purple veins under the skin like rivers on a map. Mum’s breathing, quiet as the air, dissipated by the steam, silently came and went. Mum said, ‘Oh Gordon, that feels lovely,’ and I got started on her other foot.

Gordon said, ‘She deserves this, your mum. She works too hard.’

‘You’re right there, Gordon, I do work too hard. Maybe it’s time I made a change,’ said Mum.

‘Make it with me, sweetheart.’ Gordon’s hands rubbed higher up Mum’s leg. ‘Make it with me.’

‘Oh, Gordon! That’s not what I meant.’ Mum pushed his hand away.

‘What did you mean, Mum? What change?’ I asked.

‘Oh nothing – nothing, for heaven’s sake. Can’t a woman say anything these days!’

Gordon winked at me and we kept rubbing.

On the way home Mum and me got off the bus at the shops. Mum bought cheese, lemon sponge, apple crumble, Monte Carlos, frankfurts, mayonnaise, ice cream, frozen potato puffs, peas, chops, caramel sauce, toffee squares and milk. When we got back to Nineteen Emu she said, ‘Ooh, Jimmy, that steam wore me out,’ and I helped her unpack the goods. She made a cup of tea for herself and poured me a glass of milk.

‘Will Dr Eric get a letter from the school?’ I asked her.

‘Don’t worry about that, Jimmy. You just enjoy yourself,’ she answered, cutting two squares of crumble. ‘I’ll take care of any letters.’ She picked up Agatha’s
Winter Killing
and went into the sitting room and I followed with my manuals. Soon she was asleep.

I sat on the floor reading the vacuum instruction booklet. The vacuum was old and hardly sucked. Mum had to go over and over the same dust. The booklet was dirty at the edges with my fingerprints. It was important to clean the nozzle, not to forget about it, year after year. The dust hardened and blocked the exits. I got up and walked down to Dad’s shed. The door was locked; only Mum had a key. I poked a stick into the lock but it broke, leaving half of the stick still stuck in the lock. I dug that half out with another stick then I went up to the house and got Mum’s keys out of her handbag.

I tried all the keys until I got to the last one and I stuck it into the lock and it opened the door. I stepped inside the shed and Dad’s remaining particles flooded my system. I closed my
eyes and for a moment he was with me – his hands and his arms and his smile on Uncle Rodney’s waves, the drawings across his back and chest, the scar on his arm – then I opened my eyes and let out my air and he was still missing.

I ran my hand over his things – his fridge with the stickers, his weekend bed and his tools – feeling the surfaces and the temperatures. They were all cold. I knocked my hand against the dusty glass of the window I had looked through so many times from the yard. Now I was on the inside. I picked up a paint can and shook it to listen for the paint, but the can was empty, or the paint had dried. I did the same with the jerry can, also empty. I opened the fridge – there was nothing in it, but I kept looking anyway, at the light and the silver bars. I traced my finger around the tools on the wall, following the line of my dad’s drawings. I found a pen and I drew tools that nobody had invented before. I could have helped Dad fix the Holden with my screwner. He would have asked to use my hamm driver, I could have said, ‘No, Dad, what you need is the spiver.’