The Rest is Weight (UQP Short Fiction) (10 page)

At the end of four weeks, we pack Jude’s things into her backpack and wait on the porch. Jude is ready to leave an hour early. She watches every car carefully, and when Mum’s Honda appears around the corner she stands up and claps her hands.

Mum looks even more tired than she did a month ago. She smiles at me sadly, as if I have disappointed her. She hugs Jude and then me. She picks up Jude’s bag before I can invite her inside. Jude pulls at her yellow hair in a smug way, like a teenage girl who is confident of her popularity.

‘Did we have a good time?’ Mum says. I stand on my porch like an ornament and wait for Jude to condemn me. She glances at me slyly, then nods at Mum. The gesture is just noncommittal enough for both of us to feel relief.

‘Let’s get going, shall we?’

I can’t wait to get back to my work and have the house to myself again. To be able to concentrate. To tidy knowing it will stay tidy.

Mum starts the Honda and motors away down the street. Jude waves without turning around; she could be waving at the birds.

I love you
, I think. It’s a selfish prayer. It’s the way people speak to the dead.

After the car has gone around the corner, I walk inside and pick up my books from the floor. Outside, the bulldozer starts again. It’s bloody annoying. I go to the window, stick my head out, and say, ‘Shut up, T-Rex.’

I walk to the stereo and press play on the tape that’s in there. I sit down on the couch and smooth out the pillow, catching a few strands of yellow hair in my fingers. I put my head where Jude’s head has been and hum along.

Mice

I’m stacking apples when I see the lioness. They are individual Granny Smiths, and come identically sized in a way that has always disturbed me. I’ve never quite got the hang of the perfect pyramids my manager, Tracy, makes when she’s explaining how it’s done. I should concentrate on what I’m doing more: Tracy knocked five bucks off my pay last week for daydreaming.

It’s not my fault I can’t concentrate. There is a mouse plague this year, and my house is full of them. As winter approaches I can hear them nesting, shoring up space in the wall cavity. They move boldly down the hall in the evening, stopping to snack on some carpety treat and glare at me without fear. I don’t try to get rid of them, even when I can’t sleep. Even when the lack of sleep makes me see mice that aren’t there.

The lioness is not a dream, she’s a real thing, although there is no one else in the aisle to confirm this. I know she’s real because I can smell her. It’s not a zoo-animal smell. It’s predator.

Her fur is tatty in the fluoro light and the rips in her ear tell her age. I look into her wheat-coloured eyes, and she looks frankly back. She swishes her tail at the leafy greens. No noise is made. The lettuces don’t shiver. I can’t move until she looks away. She turns in a tight curve and disappears behind the grey, late-season bananas. As soon as she has gone, I know I won’t tell anyone that I have seen her.

After I finish the apples I get sent down to parcel pick-up. It’s good to work in the loading dock. The change makes the day go faster, and away from most of the customers, I don’t have to worry so much about whether or not I look like I’m concentrating. I even smile at an old fat lady riding an electric scooter when she asks me to put her things in the luggage rack. She acknowledges me with a slow nod before scooting off.

Tracy wants to cut back on this service but a lot of old people still use it. It’s convenient for them, not having to carry their things down all those levels. It must be rough getting old, losing your strength.

The other workers are all skylarking, climbing shelves and hanging off the sides of the trolley, but I don’t feel like playing games today. When we finish the orders, I leave them to it. I take my pushbike out of the back room and pedal slowly home.

About halfway there I get a flat and have to walk. It’s not dark yet, so I don’t mind. I’m not that excited about getting home anyway. My flatmates are away and the house will be just as cold and quiet as the street. Our landlord is cheap and we don’t have any heating; I generally put the oven on and sit right next to it, away from the draught.

I keep saying I’m going to move somewhere else, like down to the city, but something always comes up. Dad’s just had a pin put in his knee, and every other weekend he needs me to climb the ladder for something. Or I get a run of extra shifts and think I’ll save the bond up first, then I spend it.

Maybe I’m waiting for a voice in my ear to say
go
.

‘Give us a hand?’

I glance up. In a square of light cast by a clapboard house, there’s a blister of warmth. A swelling of solid yellow. It’s a fat lady in a yellow dress.

It’s the lady from before, with the special scooter. She’s got herself out of the chair and is trying to turn it around so she can get the groceries out while leaning on the gate. It doesn’t look easy. Every time she shops there must be a painstaking process like this and I wonder why she doesn’t have any home help. The groceries are still piled in the luggage rack. I try to remember if there was ice cream in her order; it will have melted by now. I offer to carry the bags in for her, and she nods.

‘You came at the right time,’ she says.

I don’t say anything, just move the bags around like I’m still at work. While I’m pushing the scooter she follows me up the path on unsteady legs. She’s only halfway when I come back to help her but she waggles her arms in the air, shooing me in. Her arms have wings, big swinging wings like a plucked chicken. I go back into her little house and move the electric scooter into the hallway, where an empty space waits for it like the dent in a favourite chair.

I help her put the groceries away and am relieved when there is no ice cream. Nothing has been ruined by the wasted time.

‘Do you want a drink?’ she says. ‘I’ve just got cordial.’

‘Thanks,’ I say.

She nods. ‘Go on into the lounge room.’

It’s the same room, only a couple of soft chairs at one end. I look around while she is busy in the kitchen. It’s bare, but with a working heater. There are crocheted rugs folded on the chairs. No photos. There’s a pissy smell I think is old person, but then I hear her talking to cats at the back door.

‘Milk, puss. Milk, puss. Nice chop for you now.’ It’s almost a lullaby.

She comes over with the cordial and I take the cup, a blue plastic mug from a stacking set. We lean on opposite walls and sip our drinks. The cordial is lemon-barley flavoured, with a grainy texture. Neither one of us sits down. She might be embarrassed. She doesn’t have much mobility, and it would be awkward, risking collapse in front of a stranger.

The cats come into the room one by one, licking their lips. There are three of them. There might be more.

‘Can I borrow one of your cats?’ I say.

The woman looks disturbed.

‘Heaps of mice this year,’ I tell her. ‘I’ve tried everything but I can’t do much about them.’ I haven’t tried everything, but I feel exhausted enough to say so. I’m helpless with them. A bit of a pushover.

She doesn’t say anything. She keeps looking at me and I start thinking about the lion. Her eyes are similar. An orangey brown, they are clear and unafraid.

I bend down to pat one of the cats, an old tortoiseshell swiping at my feet. When I reach out for it, it flinches and gives me a sour look.

‘I don’t lend me cats,’ says the woman.

‘That’s fair enough,’ I say.

She reaches out to put her cup down and the arms swing, casting massive shadows on the wall behind her.

‘I should go, I left my bike outside.’ I say. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

‘Yep,’ she says.

I let myself out.

I walk the few remaining blocks home, wheeling my bike. I can’t stop thinking about the lioness. What she finds to eat. Whether she might be living in the shopping centre, or down in the basement where it’s dark and quiet. Whether maybe the lights of the shops have confused her, in the same way headlights confuse rabbits.

Predictably, the house is full of mice. I see them scuttle when I turn on the light. They are worse than cockroaches; four-limbed mammals, things you can see breathing, are harder to kill.

I push my bike into the cold hallway and fix the puncture. My hands are stiff from the cold. When I’m finished I go into the kitchen, find a lighter and open the oven.

I’ve disturbed a mouse in the middle of dinner: it’s eating crumbs off the oven floor. To a creature that size, the space
must be a ballroom. I reach in to light the stove and the
mouse runs into a compartment in the back of the machine that I didn’t even know was there.

I have to do something about them. I rack my brains for a better kind of trap, but I’m no engineer. So I do the same thing I always do. I lie awake and listen while they build their house in my wall, from my old phone bills. Eventually I get to sleep.

In the morning I wake to find that I have made a decision about the mice. It seems so simple. I ride to Terrace Fair grinning into the crisp morning air. I find Tracy at the checkout after I clock on, and volunteer for fruit and veg.

I look out for the lioness all day. I keep expecting to see her stalking past the bananas, her muscle the colour of dry grass. I spin at odd moments to catch her lurking. But she doesn’t appear.

I figure I need to tempt her with something. In a quiet moment I wander into the meat section and ask Gary if I can have a bone for my dog.

‘I didn’t know you had a dog,’ he says. He swipes his chin with the back of his hand and drops the hand to his side. A particle of white fat falls from his glove onto the floor.

‘I don’t. I’m minding it for my grandmother.’

He points his chin at a mess of bones and fat and sinew in a garbage bin. I put a plastic bag around my hand and help myself to the biggest single piece I can find without too much diving. It must weigh half a sheep. I slip the bag around it and stash it in the staff kitchen. If anyone asks I’ll say yes, the dog is enormous.

After my shift I take the meat down the fire stairs and jam the door open with a piece of cardboard. Then I walk back up and take my usual exit through the loading dock. I say goodbye to a couple of people then wheel my bike around to the open door. I push it into the stairwell and carry it down to basement level. Then I wait.

The concrete is cold. I don’t sit down. The night seems to take a long time to arrive. It must be the artificial light lingering in the stairwell, scaring the real night away. I think about the freezing that’s been done to the meat and whether it will still attract an animal, or if its tempting smell has been cleaned off by the cold.

When I hear the last of the cars leave, when I know the shopping centre above me is empty, I push the door open.

The basement under Terrace Fair is a blank space of smells and pipes. Dim light flickers through fittings that are never cleaned. It smells of shop rot and vinegar.

I put the hunk of meat down on the floor and pull the plastic bag off it, then retreat into the shadows to wait.

After an hour I’m stiff from crouching. I move my legs to stretch them, feeling the tautness built into the muscle from cycling. I suppose I’m getting fit from riding to work and back. I cradle one of my calves in my hand. It’s gone hard, like frozen meat.

Something moves in the shadows on the other side of the basement. My eyes can’t settle on it but I feel my body shift gear. Heart rate increases. Breathing tightens. Crouch becomes a wound spring.

It is enormous, but moves with careful stealth. It turns in a tight curve and out of sight. The meat lies untouched on the concrete before me. I realise with a dreadful shudder that I am probably a tastier option. What was I thinking?

I must have been working in the supermarket too long. I am so used to packets arriving on pallets, I’ve forgotten I’m in somebody’s food chain. Do we still count as prey? Is it in our genes to want to be devoured? In my head I can see old documentaries: antelope shredded in open jaws. My ears make a low kind of hum.

Under the hum I hear a voice, just a whisper.

It says, ‘Milk, puss. Milk, puss.’

I duck behind the fire door and stare through the crack at its hinges.

Soon I hear the
zimzim
of an electric scooter. It is edging across the floor towards my hunk of meat. A yellow shape sits on the scooter, in a dress like a billowing parachute. The fat lady’s arms rest against her body like two gracious cats.

She pauses at the meat. Her head bends towards it. She glances up, alert and puzzled, then lifts herself out of the scooter and balances against it, arms swinging. She bends down to pick up the meat in her bare hands. Again a look of puzzlement, directed towards my stairwell. I lean back into the shadows, silent, not even breathing.

The lady cradles the meat in her arms. She sniffs it and her mouth twitches. She arches her eyebrows and peers into the darkness beyond my hiding place.

She climbs back onto her throne with the meat in one hand. She’s an unsteady weight with a wobbling grace. She sits up straight, the half-sheep resting in her generous lap, and
zimzims
away.

On the other side of the basement there are shadows. There’s another exit over that side: a ramp up to the car park, and a boom gate that should be locked. I can feel the chill night air crawling down towards me. I can see small shapes moving over there. They might be cats. I might be sleep-deprived. The fat lady disappears into the darkness.

I listen to the electric drone move away. As it shrinks,
there is another sound. A sort of snarling yawn, without
aggression: the voice of a satisfied animal, patiently licking its lips. It compels me to make some kind of answer, creature to creature, in this jungle of cold pipes.

‘Get out,’ I say. ‘Go on. Go.’

The opposite of peace

Dear Miles,

By the time you read this, your father and I should be well on our way to the other place. It’s not personal, darl. Would you let Katie know that we wanted to see her before we left but your father was too tired. He’s sick of being sick. ‘I’m sick of being sick’ he says. We realise there are all sorts of rules against it these days but figure they’re not going to catch us – burn this and tell them it was an accident, there’s a dear. Tell them it was the dementia, stirring the wrong thing into our tea. Oops-a-daisy, as they say.

All our love,

Mum and Dad

ps
. The safe key’s on top of the fridge, under the mug tree.

When I find the note, my parents are still breathing, though very shallowly. They are lying on the ground with teacups in their hands, arranged as for a film, their fragile bodies almost translucent against the carpet. I stand over them, frozen for a minute, holding the note, my keys and a bag of groceries in my other hand. I put the keys and the plastic bag down on the bench before I ring the paramedics. Then I ring Katie in Perth.

‘I’ve just rung the paramedics. Mum and Dad have both collapsed,’ I say.

Katie says ‘
Both
of them?’ as if I’ve done something. I don’t have time to explain.

‘They’re okay. I have to get off the phone,’ I say.

‘I’ll call you back in a minute.’

The note is on apricot stationery. I am reminded, with the reflux of unbidden memories, of trying to copy my mother’s handwriting to get out of sports days, forty years ago. Her signature hasn’t changed. When the doorbell rings I fold the note into a tight square and push it into a pocket of my trousers. I’m covering the pocket with my hand while the uniforms take over, as if they can see through the fabric. As if they care.

There is no room for me in the ambulance. I ask which hospital and tell them I have to lock up. Then I start putting the groceries away.

Katie rings back. I put her on speaker so I can read her the note while I restock the fridge with milk, six eggs, and twelve individually wrapped Lite cheese slices. The old don’t seem to eat.

‘Don’t burn it, whatever you do,’ she says. Then, ‘I thought something was up. What’s in the safe?’

‘I haven’t looked.’

I pull the old milk out, shake it, drop the carton in the now empty plastic bag and hang it from a door handle. On top of the fridge I find the key under the mug tree, which holds some of Aunt Holly’s dusty pottery. My mother’s sister has been dead for ten years, but my mother never throws anything away. The clutter in the house has always irritated me, my mother’s weakness for gifts and trinkets.

‘Are you still there?’

‘Hang on. I’m taking you off speaker,’ I say.

The safe referred to in the note is not a safe but a toolbox kept under the stairs; the key is to a padlock threaded through holes drilled in the galvanised steel. My father made a point of reminding me of it only two or three months ago. But I didn’t see this coming. My hands are shaking faintly as I fit the key, opening the box with the phone cradled in my ear. I can hear Katie breathing and my ear warms as though her breath is right there.

‘What’s in the safe?’ she says again.

‘Nothing.’ There is an envelope, an off-white, A5 envelope tied with a white cotton thread. Inside there is a will.

‘
Nothing
?’

‘There’s just a will.’ I meant, the fallen surprise in my voice meant, there is nothing personal – no photographs, no mementos or precious trinkets. Inside the safe is an empty space my father has carved away from his wife’s hoardings. Inside the envelope are also the deeds to the house. I don’t read the will. I know they are giving Katie and me everything, fifty-fifty. My father showed me this two years ago, when he was diagnosed. It’s not the sort of thing you forget.

‘Thank Christ,’ Katie says. ‘They haven’t changed it, have they?’ she adds.

‘No. Listen, I have to go to the hospital –’

‘I’ll call you back.’

I stand in the middle of the room. I put my hand against my side but can feel it drawn to the note in the pocket, its shape pressing into my groin. I feel horribly abandoned and yet close, as though nothing separates me from my mother and father. As though nothing of significance has happened to me except being born, and anything I might have achieved since was just a form of suckling.

At the hospital I am told that both of my parents will live. They have ingested something that can be pumped from them. Unlike the cancers that are eating at my father’s organs, the poison can be flushed out with a little warm water. Medicine seems so primitive up close.

They are being held in separate wards, which seems like a schoolroom punishment. My mother wakes first. I am at my father’s side when a nurse comes to tell me she is conscious. I follow the nurse down the corridor, past the hand-washing station, to the zone of old women.

My mother blinks her frail eyelids a few times and then squeezes my hand. The woman is usually unbearably upbeat – she wrote
oops-a-daisy
in her final note, for crying out loud – but now she looks disappointed. Her cake has been ruined.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she says.

I just pat her hand and offer my feeble relief.

The nurse puts her head inside the curtain and calls me by my full name. She herds me into the hallway, carrying my parents’ charts.

We go through the medications they are already on and the allergies. They know my father’s case well but my mother hasn’t been ill much at all. The nurse writes all this information down. I am alarmed that it fits on two pages. At the bottom of the second page her pen pauses. She makes a professional attempt to meet my eyes.

‘I have to ask you . . . Were your parents depressed?’

I look at the wall behind her. There’s a bright sign giving hand-washing instructions.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. It hollows me, the little I know of their feelings. It should be obvious, the desire to live. But I don’t know this for certain about myself, or most of the people I love, and the answer makes no difference. What you want is immaterial. Especially to a man like my father who has already set a date with death. All he’s done is rearrange his schedule.

‘Did they mention anything to you about plans? Any self-harming?’

I snort and try to make it look like a sob. I have imagined my cheerful mother conducting teenage bleeds in her yellow bathroom. My phone’s insistent ringtone has never been so welcome. More welcome still, the nurse moves silently away, signalling that she has finished with me.

‘Katie,’ I say.

‘Are they okay?’

‘They’ll live, apparently. Mum’s awake, do you want to speak to her?’

‘How is she?’

‘Weak, but – you know. Mum.’ We both expel a small packet of air.

‘All right, put her on.’

But when I go back to the room, my mother is not in her bed.

I glance towards the bathroom, which is open and empty. Then I swear into the phone and walk into the corridor, disoriented for a second as to which way to run. Towards the hand-washing station and then left, into the men’s zone. I am still holding the phone to my ear and can hear Katie huffing and puffing as if she’s the one who’s running into our father’s room.

‘Miles! What’s happened?’

‘No,’ I say. My mother is standing over the bed. Her hands are on my father’s face. My instinct is to back away and void my guts. I feel like I’m witnessing the primal scene again.

‘Miles, if it’s not a good time . . .’ runs Katie’s voice.

‘Mum,’ I manage, and hold the phone out. My mother is pale; light seems to shine through her like an x-ray, emphasising the bone. She lifts her face to mine and the eyes are bare, scraped out by suffering. But her mouth is set with will. The woman has been stripped down to a basic form.

It’s my father’s sunken skull that is frail. When death happens slowly you don’t see it coming. His breaths are ragged and strained. Even though he’s sleeping, his breathing is the opposite of peace.

‘It’s Katie,’ I say, and press the phone into my mother’s hand.

She gives me a look I hope is grateful and murmurs into the handset. ‘He’s right here,’ she says. She holds the phone to my father’s ear and nods as Kate’s tiny, captured voice speaks. Then she ends the call and gives the phone back to me. We make the formation we always make here, the hospital shape with my father’s body between us and no words. My father breathes and pauses. He doesn’t wake.

My mother holds her breath. She holds until he exhales, then exhales with him, drawing the sound out to its full extent.

The woman who can’t throw anything away waits, and breathes again. And I am lost, a small boy full up with the bitterness of separation.