Portable Curiosities (2 page)

‘Well, it's not welcome in this house, do you hear?' says my mother. ‘Men with tattoos! Ladies with bells! Lizards in cots!'

One hand is on her hip and the other against her forehead.

‘It's not your fault about the baby,' I say. ‘It was black magic.'

My father looks at me. ‘Take this lizard out.'

I pick up my friend and leave. I stand outside the room and watch my parents.

My father is trying to hug my mother.

‘I'm fine,' she says. ‘Don't touch me.'

She pushes her wrists hard against his chest and says nothing more.

*

My mother's bruises are getting worse.

The lizard boy is the cause of it. He clutches her legs as she does the housework. She wipes down the kitchen sink, sweeps the floor and dusts the curtain rails, and all the while he digs deeper into the skin around her ankles.

‘What bruises?' she says when I point them out. ‘I don't see any bruises.'

‘Yeah, what bruises?' echoes my sister.

I introduce the lizard boy to the other ghosts in the house.

He can't walk up walls with them but they wave to him and smile from their sideways world.

Yet despite his new family, he still won't let go of my mother.

My family is sitting around the dinner table, eating.

‘I saw a dress I want,' says my sister.

‘Toilet paper is getting too expensive,' says my mother.

‘The price of water is going up,' says my father.

‘I don't want to do any homework,' says my sister.

‘It's time to prune the mango tree,' says my mother.

‘The apples I bought are going soft,' says my father, ‘why isn't anyone eating them?'

In the same room are the ghosts, sitting at a table on the wall.

They copy everything my family says.

The girl talks of dresses and homework. The woman talks of toilet paper and pruning. The man talks of water and bad apples.

The woman is adamant about cutting that mango tree down to size, as if she really can do it.

‘There's another family in the house,' I say. ‘They're sitting on the wall having dinner.'

My family slices its steamed fish and crunches its broccoli and says nothing.

The lizard boy crouches under the table, clutching my mother's ankle.

I save part of my dinner and leave it on the floor of my bedroom for the boy.

I don't know how else to help him.

My mother discovers me doing this. ‘What's going on here?'

‘It's for a cat.'

‘How does it get into your bedroom?'

‘I leave my window open.'

‘Whose cat is it?'

‘Dunno.'

‘Is it really a cat or is it another imaginary friend?'

‘Yes, it's a cat. It's orange. And I don't have any friends.'

My mother folds her arms. ‘I haven't seen a cat around.'

‘Here, it scratched the windowsill.' I point to needle marks I once made when I was bored with backstitch.

‘Don't feed cats or they'll keep coming back.'

‘But it's starving.'

‘That cat is someone else's problem,' says my mother. ‘If you help one, the hordes will come.'

‘What about cats that don't belong to anyone?'

‘That's their bad luck,' says my mother.

The lizard boy lets go of my mother's legs.

He crouches in the cupboard under the stairs and won't come out.

I watch him in the half-dark, and he watches me. He flickers. I see him as an older boy, a teenager, a young man and as an old man.

Then he goes back to looking like a little boy.

‘I see what you mean,' I say. ‘You would have been handsome and strong.'

*

I wake in the night with pains in my belly that make me double over and cry out. My third eye squints and smarts. My forehead is hot.

‘I'm taking you to the hospital,' says my mother.

‘I'm not going,' I say.

I scream for my friend but he doesn't come.

The emergency doctor speaks with my mother and nods.

I am wheeled into an operating room and the anaesthetic kicks in.

When I open my eyes, the surgeon is making an incision in my belly. Out of it she pulls my third eye.

‘You've been a bad girl,' says the surgeon. She tosses my eye to an assistant, who laughs and tosses it to another.

‘Catch!' shrieks the assistant, but the other misses.

I can't see where my eye lands.

I wake again and am looking at the ceiling.

I can't move. Tears are rolling down my face. I can't lift my hand to wipe them away.

A nurse notices I'm conscious and says: ‘Oh, my love.'

She wipes one side of my face and then the other.

‘Everything's okay, chicken. No need to panic. You'll be able to move again soon.'

My mother is at my bedside. ‘You're a brave little girl,' she says, running her fingers through my fringe. ‘It was for the best.'

I don't believe her.

Some cord has been cut, and whatever has been taken is now alone somewhere in the darkness.

My parents stop on the way home to pick up chicken broth that neighbours have made for me.

‘It'll make you stronger,' says my mother, through the car window. ‘I'll only be a second.'

I hear her talking to the neighbours about an appendix.

As I wait, an old man covered in tattoos shouts at me from his verandah.

‘My eye sees your eye.' He points to his forehead and then to me.

I turn away, groggy.

When I look back, he has vanished.

I don't know about any eye.

I will become a girl who sits at the kitchen table every night and talks about dresses.

An orange cat is sitting on our front doorstep, next to a white cot. It swishes its tail at me.

‘Whose cot is that?' I ask, bundled in my father's arms.

‘Someone's coming to take it off our hands,' he says.

A lizard the length of my forearm is lying at the feet of the cat, decapitated. Ants are swarming over the body.

‘Cats kill lizards?' I ask.

‘They do it to please, I think,' says my father. ‘I'm sorry about your lizard.'

‘My lizard?'

‘We have a surprise for you,' he says. ‘You're getting to be such a big girl we decided it's time you have a new room.'

My father carries me down the hallway to a cold space painted blue.

The window of the room looks out onto the front doorstep.

I watch my father sit there with his head in his hands until a car pulls up. A young man gets out, hands my father a twenty-dollar note and carries the cot away.

My father's shoulders shake.

I pretend not to see.

*

In the shower, my mother is being careful not to scrub too hard.

‘I don't want to hurt you,' she says.

I am silent.

I listen to the spray of the water against our bodies and the hum of the exhaust fan above our heads.

The next shower I insist on having alone.

‘Don't touch me,' I say to her, when she goes to put on my shower cap.

I am the one to snap the elastic in place, and I am the one to put my mud-caked back against the waterfall, and I am the one to walk past the laundry acting like I can't hear the muffled sobs of my mother coming from behind the door.

*

In the blue room, I dream of a porcelain man. His face is covered with scenes from the Yangtze River.

‘This world is two worlds,' he says, ‘and the divide between them is finer than a layer of human skin.'

‘Here we are laughing,' says the man, pointing at the face of a laughing man etched on his arm. ‘And here we are crying.'

He takes a penknife and cuts a slow, deep line through the face of the laughing man. Blood spills out, a thick red stream.

He passes a hand over the laughing man, and the stream vanishes.

‘Something is wrong with those who won't see the laughing, and something is wrong with those who won't see the crying. Don't play dumb with me, China Doll.'

He lifts me by the armpits and puts me on his workbench.

He takes out his gun of shuddering ink, and brings the tip to my skin.

I struggle but he holds me firm.

A blue eye forms on my belly.

The Fantastic Breasts

So I see this pair of Fantastic Breasts one day.

I'm at a conference, in the foyer, pinning on my name tag. A hundred plain-looking, spotty breasts are milling about, sipping chamomile tea from styrofoam cups. They're all wearing far-sighted spectacles that magnify their nipples. The topic of the next session is The Difficulties of an Objectified Existence in a Patriarchal World, whatever that means. Everyone's standing around commiserating and consciousness-raising, which is getting them so heated their spectacles are fogging up.

I down my espresso and think about the whole sorry affair. What's sorry about it is that I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel at this conference. I've taken a big risk in going where few men have dared venture and it's turned out to be a disappointment: the probability of finding a bit of good-quality breast here among the styrofoam is negligible. I should have known better. After all, I've had a lifetime's experience passing from chest to ample chest, in pursuit of that one perfect set of breasts to have and to hold. But, for some reason, A-grade breasts have continued to elude my grasp. I begin to wonder if I should unpin my name tag and abandon the noble quest forever.

Then, all of a sudden, I spot these Fantastic Breasts, so fantastic they deserve a capital F and a capital B. They come tottering out of nowhere on gazelle legs, backed by a caboose that fell from a peach tree in heaven. The Breasts bound and quiver in slow motion like no others can. They are full cream milk.

They're so swollen it's like the Global Breast Incubator pumped them with excess milk, let them ripen a little longer than usual, scooped them off the great conveyor belt, screwed them onto that pair of stilt legs and gave them a slap on the rump to get them going on their merry way.

I'm hooked. Staring into that cleavage, I see my voluptuous future. There haven't been breasts this fantastic since the beginning of time.

The Fantastic Breasts are all-rounders, a supernaturally talented two-for-one deal. They don't have a voice but, boy, can they tap dance! Between them, they can pick a matchstick off the ground. They've won three Olympic golds on the uneven bars. They can mime from memory the value of π to a million decimal places, two decimal places at a time. They can play Beatles records with their nipples without wearing out the grooves.

Though located in Sydney, the Fantastic Breasts can launch themselves high enough to get a bird's-eye view of Tokyo. Sometimes they drop in on a Giants baseball game at Tokyo Dome and catch a fly ball at the wall while standing at home plate.

The Fantastic Breasts are such knockouts they're a mythology in themselves. There's even a comic book series based on them.

In the first frame, a guy is kicking a vending machine in a dark alley. It's out of order. The guy's Coke is stuck.

A shadow looms behind him.

HANDS UP. TURN AROUND. DON'T TRY ANYTHING CLEVER.

The guy does as he's told.

The shadow comes into full view, wearing a grotesque dolphin mask and pointing a gun right at the guy's guts.

GOLLY
,
says the guy, quaking in his boots.
IT'S THE DOLPHIN!

A drop of sweat rolls down the side of his face.

Suddenly – POW! SLAM! BANG! The Dolphin's cheek is on the bitumen, pinned there by the stiletto heel of a studded, black patent leather, thigh-high boot.

This boot belongs to the Fantastic Breasts.

Fluorescent light from the vending machine illuminates the Fantastic Breasts for titillation. Stunning in their symmetry, they spill out over their skimpy (yet surprisingly supportive) bulletproof bra, which is dominated by black latex and diamond spikes.

Snow falls from the narrow sky above the alley. The Breasts haven't even bothered putting on a trench coat. They're kept hot by the steam rising from their own skin.

HOW CAN I THANK YOU, FANTASTIC BREASTS?
asks the guy.

The Fantastic Breasts kick the vending machine. Cans rattle out. The guy gulps. The Breasts hand him a Coke and take a few more for the road.

Then, in one bound, the Fantastic Breasts are gone.

Hollywood adapts the comics into the blockbuster hits
The Fantastic Breasts
,
2 Breasts 2 Fantastic
,
The Fantastic Breasts 3: Tokyo Drift
and
The Fantastic Breasts: Redid, Redone & Rewound
.

They also make
The Fantastic Breasts: First Dawn
, which takes us back a generation to where the feud with the Dolphin all started on the dusty plains of somewhere far, far away. The film reveals that the Fantastic Breasts and the Dolphin were childhood playmates and friendly chess rivals before a catastrophic event defined their allegiances and changed their destinies forever.

As the films progress, the Fantastic Breasts perform increasingly mind-boggling feats in slow motion, saving the metropolis one arousing quiver at a time.

In the final scene of
The Fantastic Breasts: Redid, Redone & Rewound
,
one breast wraps itself around the mainmast of a ship like a boa constrictor, functioning as an anchor for the other breast to stretch a kilometre and pluck a drowning child from the middle of the Indian Ocean. The Fantastic Breasts, in an amazing revelation, also turn out to be inflatable and motorised, guiding the distressed ship to safety despite the best efforts of the Dolphin and his seafaring cronies to sink the vessel.

The closing credits roll. The theme song kicks in: half sax, half sex.

In the bonus DVD feature,
The Making of the Fantastic Breasts
, the producers discuss how they screen-tested every A-list set of Hollywood breasts for the role but discovered none fantastic enough to cast.

The producers recount to the camera how they pled with the Fantastic Breasts to play themselves in the title role. The producers look at each other knowingly, cross their arms and grin. They tell us they got their way in the end, and that casting the Fantastic Breasts as the Fantastic Breasts turned out to be a masterful stroke of filmmaking – a giant leap forward for twenty-first-century cinema.

The producers fail to mention, however, the TV spin-off series they financed, which stars a less fantastic set of breasts and which has found itself playing 3 a.m. TV slots a little earlier than anticipated.

Although the Fantastic Breasts save the world by day, they're mine by night.

I serenade them under the stars in the middle of a Roman piazza. I dine with them in a candlelit garden, where a lute player perches on the side of a fountain and strums Renaissance melodies. I feed them strawberries and chocolate truffles on Saturday nights. I whisper them sweet nothings. I grow them English roses and carpet the bedroom with petals. I present them with my great-grandmother's rings. I praise their kindness, generosity and intelligence; let them precede me into lifts, through doorways and railway ticket gates; converse with their less well-endowed friends at interminable dinner parties; cuddle them when they're not in the mood; and listen to their rants about the inconsiderate citizens of the metropolis.

Every evening, without fail, the Fantastic Breasts and I go out together for a stroll. People marvel at their charm and at how proud I must feel to be the companion of the Fantastic Breasts. At home, we sit by the fire and I tell the Fantastic Breasts how beautiful they are. The Breasts curl up against me like helpless, blind puppies.

But sometimes, when I'm feeling down, I start thinking that the Fantastic Breasts aren't all that fantastic. I begin to think they're getting full of themselves and I wonder who they think they are, going around assuming they deserve a capital F and a capital B and thinking they can parade me around the streets like some sort of trophy.

So I take them out for a walk and when people start gawking I whisper sweet nothings to the breasts like Stay, Sit, Fetch, Heel, Roll Over and Beg.

And when I tire of that, I put them back in the bedroom and say Lie Down and I whisper that they dress like they're asking for it and that they're looking flabbier these days and that the producers called earlier to ask why they're so out of shape and I whisper to the breasts that I saw them flirting with that extra on set I'm not stupid I see what's going on and maybe it's my fault for assuming I could expect more from breasts that make the lewd sort of movies they make and then I start feeling a bit better about myself and even a bit like a superhero and I push the breasts up against the wall and hold them there and they squirm and their boots can't touch the floor. Then I release them and the breasts start getting their clothes together and stuffing them into a big bag and I punch a wall and I shout where are you going you don't have any real friends and all your money's in my bank account and I punch another wall to match the hole in the first one because of course I like symmetry and then the breasts cower against the wardrobe and so I stop punching holes and sit on the bed and sob into my hands and promise I won't do it again and I say I know it's my problem I'm messed up and will they forgive me I'm only being protective because I love them too much and I can't help it I'm jealous of any man who even looks their way and I never meant to hurt them and I only want what's best for them and please remember the serenade in the piazza and the English roses and my great-grandmother's rings and the strawberries and the chocolates and all those times I sat through interminable dinner parties with their friends and how if you add all that time and effort up it shows I love the breasts more than any other breasts in the universe.

And when the breasts have stopped trying to self-harm by throwing themselves against the wardrobe and the windows and the bathroom mirror and when I've got them down on the carpet and they're a bit calmer, I remind them they're not babies anymore, they can't be so emotional, they're embarrassing themselves by being such drama queens, all I wanted was to conduct a normal conversation like normal grownups do, that I only start these conversations sometimes when I'm feeling down, that a guy needs to be able to vent his feelings once in a while without the threat of breasts going psycho, that it's not like I even beat them up, and I also remind them of how much I care about them even though they're so sheltered from reality they don't even realise no other man alive would treat a pair of breasts like them so well, and they should always remember there are other breasts out there who'd be grateful to have a man as loving and protective and understanding as I am.

Then I forgive them for making such a disgraceful scene and I cuddle them and let them lie against me again like helpless, blind puppies.

And as I sit there, stroking them to sleep, I think about how the Fantastic Breasts need me and how the metropolis, in turn, needs the Fantastic Breasts and therefore how, without my continued commitment to the care of the Fantastic Breasts, the metropolis faces doom. Then I close my eyes and I don't feel so bad anymore, comforted by the knowledge that I am the manliest manly man the world has ever seen.

But a man who is the manliest of manly men must also think responsibly about the future of the metropolis. So I start considering how in-built obsolescence is a fact of life and how mammary glands are no exception to the rule. And I decide that, once the Fantastic Breasts begin to slouch and sag, and when they begin to miss the fly balls at Tokyo Dome, and when no one marvels at them anymore when I take them out for a stroll, I'll need to begin keeping an eye out for a more youthful, more fantastic set of breasts that are likely to come tottering out of nowhere, preferably a set synthetically enhanced so that they depreciate in value at a much slower rate than the ugly old hag of a set I once picked up at that miserable conference on The Difficulties of an Objectified Existence in a Patriarchal World.