New Australian Stories 2 (15 page)

She reached the black marble steps leading down to Lenin. She was here now; she should make the effort to see, even if it struck her, as it surely had her niece, as rather ghoulish, voyeuristic. V.I. Lenin, the man of letters he had called himself, a man of the people, who had asked to be buried next to his mother. Even in death he had been cheated, thought Petra; revered, embalmed, preserved for posterity, opposite the modish merchandise of GUM. Stepping down, grateful for the cool, the dark, the unusual silence, she drew in her breath. Around a corner it came into view — deep red drapes, a marble coffin, the body laid out, a ghostly, creamy face in profile. You were not allowed to stop, you had to keep walking in a mute semi-circle, tourists in front of you, tourists behind, you had just enough time to catch a glimpse of the past. As she came face to face with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Petra saw that one of his hands was clenched, the other loose, and that his face was small, almost dainty and oddly alive, his brow slightly furrowed. It made him look perplexed, as if his dying thought had been a quizzical question, some faint, persistent stirring of desire. Petra felt the hush of her surroundings, the cool of the room on her drying skin, and for just a moment, just the smallest rush of time, the circle of people dissolved around her, everything solid melted into air. She was utterly transfixed, touched by the curled-up hand; the smooth, almost boyish complexion; the expression, above all the expression, of Lenin lost to some dream of history, even, perhaps, to himself.

Then it was over, and she was returned to the heat and light of the world, hearing the shudders of people sweeping past her, a teenage girl flapping and shrieking:
gross me out,
I'm never gunna look at a dead guy again.
Petra had to smile at this youthful conviction and the flailing girlish arms, at her own sombre, unexpected reflection, her moment of touristic grace. It had all happened in the blink of an eye, the flash of a camera if one had been permitted. Lenin was a dead guy, and she needed to get out of the sun, and tonight she would board the train for St Petersburg, home of the world's largest museum. The Hermitage, she'd read, housed so many objects that it would take ten years to merely glance at each one.

As she set off for the hotel, in need of water and rest, she thought once more of waxy Lenin, and wondered what her nephew would make of that strangely moving face. She could picture Mattie's own face, his blue-eyed brightness, as she asked him again to accompany her to Russia, to help her see the sights and to help her with the language, to walk down together to Lenin's crowded tomb.
It's an earnest
request, Mattie
, she would say, and they would laugh, already beginning to make their plans.

Moth

JENNIFER MILLS

I slept in the dark although I was afraid of it. The lamp would attract moths. If I leaned to one side of my bed I could watch the moths flash around the streetlight. I tried to count them, white bellies, fearless feather wings. I got quite good at this, and listening. Counting helps me hear better, hones my focus.

After they thought I was asleep my mother would talk about wanting a baby. Something in her had broken when I was born, and she couldn't have any more kids. I'm not saying I broke it, just that I was the end of the line for us. Not a good end, either. These talks would finish with my mother whimpering. She would cry and my father would say, we'll work something out, or we'll figure it out, as if it was a maths problem. I am the best at maths in this family, but no one asked me for my opinion. They didn't know that I was listening. They didn't know that the moths were listening too.

Another thing I liked about sleeping with the lights out is that it made the shadows walk around the room. I was an only child and I liked to count them while they danced. Sometimes I would take a torch and read under the covers from the
Child's Book of Poems
. When I looked out from under the covers I would see them, the little people. I had outgrown the book and I didn't believe in them but it was familiar and I liked reading the rhymes out loud under my breath like a chant:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

If anyone had invited me, I would have gone, even though I was past believing. But no one asked.

I was an only child until I was almost ten, until the discussions between my mother and father got louder, and then quieter, and one day at dinner they gave me a Talk about wouldn't it be
exciting
to have a little baby brother or sister, and I said no, I didn't think it would, and they said there are poor children starving to death all around the world, and we have plenty of room to spare in our family, and I thought to myself let them starve, but I didn't say it aloud. I said no, we don't, but even that I whispered. I scraped the gravy with my fork and my dad didn't even ask me to stop, so I knew they were serious.

It turned out it
was
a maths problem. There were more talks and a visit from a man with glasses who didn't want tea, and the problem was worked out on pieces of paper. A few weeks later, Mothling arrived. He didn't arrive in the normal way, like you or me, tugged from our mother's bellies. He came out of an office, and Mum and Dad had to pick him up. Before that, he was from a poor country with a lot of extra children. Mary has nine apples, and Johnny only has one.

When they brought him inside I peeked into the baby carrier and saw that Mothling was a silky, grey-brown colour. His eyes were closed and his forehead was as wrinkled as a witchetty grub. I prodded him, but he didn't stir. He didn't look right to me, all still and folded, but what would I know? It was late, and I was soon sent to bed to listen to them coo over him. Before I turned the lamp out I counted the small dead moths in the bottom of the light fitting. There were twenty-six. When I switched it off the streetlight came shining into the room like a cold electric moon, and I could see the moths dance spells around it.

The moths are called bogongs. I looked them up on the internet. They are migrants, fat and hungry. They come in huge numbers every spring, on their way to aestivate in cool dark caves in the mountains. Aestivate means summer like jennifer mills hibernate means winter. They aestivate in a prolonged torpor. They are pressed up against each other in a pattern like roof tiles, still and close and folded.

Mothling was a very quiet baby. He hardly ever cried. When he opened his eyes they were solemn, like the boy in the poem. At first my uncle Keith thought he was soft in the head. He told me so with beer-breath at the showing-off barbecue. I asked my father if the baby was soft in the head. They are all soft-headed when they first arrive, my father told me. You're not to squash or hug too hard or press down on his head, he said. Mothling's eyes always looked where the light was. I practised turning the lights on and off in the hallway and watching him turn his slow fat head towards them like a bug.

In some of those caves there are 15,000 moths per square metre. That is a lot of moths. If you spread out your hand and pushed it into the cave wall you would squash an average of 150 moths. When you lifted your hand again it would be covered in brown dust, and the moths would fall in a soft heap. They leave their dead on the ground. In some of these caves the bodies of moths are over a metre deep.

The head of Mothling hardened but his body stayed larval, so soft you could poke through to the guts with a matchstick. I sometimes did this if I caught a moth in my room; pressed into the long, furred abdomen, and a wet white goo would come out, and the moth would crawl along with its guts leaking, stuck onto the ground. Then I would have to crush it altogether.

Are there mountains where he is from? I asked my father. Yes, he said. And caves in the mountains? Yes, he said, and then he looked doubtful. I think so. It's very dry there. It's mostly desert.

Mothling hated water. The first time we tried to give him a bath he was very still, very quiet, until Mum got him near the warm water, Johnson's at the ready, and he began to scream. The scream came from his body like a shadow, like a flapping blanket, like wings. Mum couldn't bear it.

I thought I would get more tolerant of a baby crying, not less, she said. But I can't stand it. Not just this baby. Any baby. It's true, she'd hover over prams in the street, gurgle at strangers, give other mothers looks of dismay which were only a bit sympathetic. It was embarrassing and it meant that when I was a baby, she didn't use to mind that much.

When Mothling cried he meant it, and everyone heard. The neighbourhood shook. It was 5.6 on the Richter scale. Mothling, stop crying, I said from the doorway. Shut up. My father stood beside me and placed one heavy hand on my head. Call him Matthew, he said. That's his name.

Mothhew, I said.

Properly, he said, but he went in to lift the crying baby and left me in the hall.

That year there was a plague of them. They liked the school hall. The teachers said they got in the old air vents and headed for the light. On Diversity Day we had to watch international dancing in the hall, which meant it was assembly until the start of recess. There were moths crawling on the ground and packed into the corners. Other girls squealed in the aisles. I sat in the back of assembly next to the Year 6 boys. They didn't talk to me but they let me sit there because I had punched Leah Nolan in the mouth the previous term and made her lip bleed.

We crushed moths with our shoes until we got bored. Then we gathered them up into piles. The boys put them on the backs of people's necks in the row in front. I pocketed mine and felt the shimmering dust creep over my hand as they burrowed for pocket safety. Someone in front was talking about refugees. Why are refugees like sperm, whispered Jaydn West beside me. Heaps of 'em get in, but only one of 'em works. The other boys laughed. I wriggled into my chair and wiped the moth dust on my uniform.

Then Jaydn West leaned over and spoke to me. Hey, isn't your baby brother a reffo? he said. No, I said. He's not my brother. Why don't you throw him off a boat, Jaydn asked. He laughed. He's not even my brother, I said. He's not even — but I couldn't say it out loud.

At the end of the day I ran to the road before the bell went so that I could see my mother arrive. I got in the car before anyone saw Mothling curled in his chrysalis in the back. It's not like he was my brother. He wasn't even human. Was I the only one who could see it?

As the days grew hotter, and the bogongs began to thin out, I wondered when he would disappear, go with the mass migration to the mountains. Instead he just slept a lot. Summer was tiptoes, lots of Milo sitting on the top of cold milk, and the morning sun like a light switched on in the kitchen. Dad and I had breakfast together, and I ran out into the heat when the bus came. It stopped right at the top of our cul-de-sac. I looked down the new-laid street at our house of mottled brick and red tiles, thinking of the moths that were gathering in the mountain caves. Maybe now he would go with them. The bus heaved me off to school, brought me home again. Soon it would be holidays.

The heat got to all of us. We were all tired; when I slept in on Saturdays, Dad said I was growing. But Mothling slept the most of all. Slowly he got fatter and paler and mothier. His eyes were too wide apart for a baby. His hair grew dark brown, silken, and tufting out like feelers. His skin had a brown shine on it like glittery powder that would come off on my hand. I tried not to damage him, but it was impossible not to get the dust off him. I always had to wash my hands afterwards.

Mum called it
down
. His down would grow back the next day. The dust shine was like a fine fur. Up close in certain lights the brown was rainbow colours like the glaze on my grandmother's teacups which I wasn't allowed to touch. It was pretty and gross at the same time.

The longer the days got, the more Mothling slept. He only woke at night to feed. Mum dragged a camp bed into Mothling's room. She got pale and fat and she became nocturnal. My father and I hung around the house all day with these soft fat lumps breathing at the end of the hall. He was frightened of that baby, I knew it. I sat at the pine table and did my homework. I heard the fluttering of mothy breaths.

At night my mother prowled around the house. She carried Mothling wrapped in a blanket on her chest. He was usually asleep but sometimes in the night he liked to look out over her shoulders with his big sorrow-dark eyes. Sometimes I got up and followed them. They never noticed me; they were under some kind of spell. Mum had her whole body curled around the baby, and Mothling had his eyes fixed on the windows. He peered towards the streetlights outside, waiting for something. Waiting for his real family to come.

Sometimes I walked home from school past the shop. Once I ran into the Year 6 boys. It was almost holidays, they were almost at high school. I almost ignored them, but then Jaydn waved and I paused, took half a step towards him. Hey, he said. Tell your little brother something for me? Yeah, I said. Tell him fuck off we're full.

I ran home without going into the shop. I ran into Mothling's room and stared at him for a while. Then I opened his window. I swear that is all I did. Opened a window. I stood in the room with Mothling and I willed him to leave. I counted the posts on his crib and the rings on the curtain rail and then I started on the lines in the carpet. Finally I wiped the dust from my hands and went to bed.