The Eye of the Sheep (7 page)

Dad pushed me up the slope of Cobham eight more times, then he said, ‘Jesus, son. I’m wrecked.’

We walked back to Emu Street, dragging the go-cart, and when we got home Robby was in the kitchen. He looked at our red and sweating faces as if he wasn’t sure, and then I said, ‘Dad and me made a go-cart. A go-cart, Robby!’

‘That we did,’ said Dad, taking a beer from the fridge. ‘Go and show him, Jim. Take him for a ride.’

Robby looked at Dad like he didn’t believe it, then he went outside and saw it for himself. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

Robby and me went further than Cobham, all the way up Maidstone, then we both got on the seat, him in front, me
behind, and we went so fast that when we got to the bottom a wheel fell off.

‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘Oh no.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Robby. ‘It was my fault.’

‘Oh no,’ I said.

When we got home Dad was sitting on the back step reading the newspaper.

I held out the wheel. ‘Sorry, Dad,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

Robby looked at the grass, kicking at a stone.

Dad took the wheel and rolled it across the yard. ‘Boys, if the wheels don’t fall off your go-cart by the end of the day you haven’t ridden her properly,’ he said. Everything expanded, as if Dad’s words had a power to release.

‘And we rode her properly, Dad, we really did!’

Dad bought us a pizza for dinner and it arrived with a man in its own plastic case and it had pineapple.
Pineapple!
It was dessert and dinner mixed. The flavours filled up every hole in my system.

‘That’s one way to get him to shut up, hey, Rob? A Hawaiian from Pier Street,’ said Dad.

‘We need a fridge full,’ said Robby, and they both laughed as if they knew a joke that I didn’t and it was sweet music like a heartache.

After dinner we watched a movie in the sitting room called
The Thing
but when the thing went into the snow and came back the same shape as the man he was chasing I jumped and screamed, and Dad said, ‘Jesus, we don’t want the kid to have nightmares. Robby, you want to give your brother that bath your mother was talking about?’

And Robby said, ‘Okay, Dad,’ and took me to the bathroom. ‘Get in the bath,’ he said.

‘I don’t need a bath,’ I told him.

‘Yes you do. You stink.’

‘Not tonight, Robby, not tonight.’

‘You have to. Mum said.’

‘Are you having one?’ I asked him.

‘I’ll have a shower later,’ Robby answered.

‘Dad has showers,’ I said.

‘Not only Dad,’ he said. ‘Get in the bath, Jimmy.’ I took off my shoes but that’s all. ‘You’ve got to take your clothes off, Jimmy.’

‘No,’ I said. I didn’t like to take off my clothes. There was too much skin. There were parts of me I hardly ever saw and didn’t want to see. I didn’t know why they were shaped that way. If you pulled at those roots hard enough what would you see in the hole left behind? When Uncle Rodney shot the rabbit and cut its stomach open I saw a hole full of fibres like worms, black and purple and damp. My mouth filled with water and I vomited. Uncle Rodney laughed and said, ‘Another weak stomach in the family, hey, Gav?’

‘Come on, Jimmy, take off your clothes.’ Robby stood with his hands on his hips beside the bath.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Okay, then, you can keep your clothes on but you’ve got to have a bath.’

‘Okay, then.’ I sat in the bath with my trousers floating around me, my t-shirt rising up, my socks sticking to my feet. Everything filled with water.

Robby and me went to bed after the bath. Robby kept the light on and read Biggles. The cover of his book had a man standing beside a brown plane.

‘Why is he Biggles, Robby? Why is he Biggles?’

Robby turned the page and didn’t answer.

‘Robby? Robby? Why Biggles?’

Dad opened the door. ‘You boys alright in here?’

‘Yes, Dad, yes,’ I said.

He grinned suddenly. ‘Good day?’

‘Good day, Dad. Yes, good day.’

Robby looked over the top of his book and smiled at Dad. It had been a long time since Robby had given him one like that.

‘Okay, well you can read a bit longer then it’s lights out. I’ll leave that up to you, hey, Rob?’

‘Yep,’ Robby answered, eyes back on his page.

‘Night, boys,’ said Dad, pulling the door to almost closed.

A little while later we heard Merle singing ‘Going Where the Lonely Go’ from the sitting room. Robby stopped reading. A shadow passed across his face. ‘Whatever you do, don’t go back in to see Dad tonight,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘It’s Friday night.’

‘So? So?’

‘Just don’t, okay?’

‘Okay, Robby. No going in to Dad, okay.’

Robby put down Biggles and switched off the light.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I heard a smash. I jumped out of my bed and got in with Robby. ‘Robby, did you hear that?’ I asked him. Robby moaned. My cells sped up, like the
go-cart at the top of the hill, gathering speed on its way down. ‘Robby.’ I pushed against him. ‘Did you hear that?’

‘What?’ he mumbled.

‘Listen.’ We lay there, the warmth of his back against my front.

Something fell, as if it had been kicked. Robby got out of bed and closed the door. I wished Biggles was here with his brown plane.

‘It’s Dad,’ said Robby.

‘What will he do without Mum?’ I asked him.

‘Shhh . . .’ said Robby. ‘Don’t say anything.’

There was another smash. Then the whole house began to fall – down down down, faster and faster. I gripped onto Robby as if he was strong enough to stop it.

In the morning Dad only looked at me for a second, when he picked up his coffee cup and took a sip. Then he went back to hammering the cupboard door that had been swinging loose on its hinges. There were vacuum-cleaner tracks over the carpet. I followed them, zigzagging between rooms. The carpet furs stood up as straight as soldiers. The dishes were done and put away. The kitchen floor didn’t have cereal or hairs stuck to it. I could hear the washing machine rumbling from the laundry.

I could see there was a war going on inside Dad’s head as he hammered. That’s what made his neck sweat. Every day there were more men joining the battle. They shot arrows and bullets at each other and threw bombs full of glass and splinters. It hurt him to look at me or Robby because of the shrapnel caught in his eyes.

•

Why was it one thing one day and something different the next?

‘I’m going to the hospital to pick up your mother,’ Dad said, pulling his head out of the cupboard. ‘Robby, you stay here with Jim, okay?’

Robby didn’t answer.

Dad checked the new door screwed tightly to its hinge, then he left. I heard something smash outside, then the lid of the metal bin slamming down.

While Dad was gone Robby and me watched the television. Robby didn’t want to do anything else. He didn’t want to go into the wetlands to see if
Lady Free
had been flooded. He didn’t want to look for snakes or show me his comics. He didn’t answer a single question I asked him. What makes the television turn on? Where has the electricity come from? Where is the beginning of electricity? Robby sat staring at the screen without moving. I could feel vibrations coming off his skin. He only blinked four times from ad to ad. It made me speed up just being close to him.

When I heard the Holden in the driveway I ran to the door but Robby said, ‘Let her get inside, Jimmy.’

‘But I want to help her! I want to help her!’

‘You will if you just wait till she’s inside.’

I watched Dad through the window as he took Mum’s hand when she got out of the car. As she smiled up at him her face became a heart. Dad led her slowly up the path. The closer she came to the house the faster I became. Any minute she would come through the door! Any minute! Any minute! And then the door opened.

‘Mum! Mum!’ I tried to climb her.

Robby said, ‘Jimmy!’

Mum said, ‘It’s okay, love.’ She came to Robby with me holding on to one side and she pulled him to her. ‘Oh, my sweet boy, Robby, you did such a good job with your brother.’ For a moment he was hidden by her wide, soft arms and I could only see the top of his head, his hair sticking to her dress with the static. Then he stepped back and his eyes were wet as if the pools inside them couldn’t hold. Mum looked around the house. ‘It’s so tidy. Looks like you boys hardly need me here at all.’

‘We need you, Mum, we need you.’ I said. ‘We really need you.’

‘The boy’s got that one right,’ said Dad. He touched her arm, just at the elbow, quickly, as if he didn’t know if the arm wanted it.

Later, when Dad and Mum were watching the news together in the sitting room, I went into the yard, lifted the lid of the garbage bin and looked inside. It was filled with the broken glass of a thousand shipwrecked Cutty Sarks.

For weeks after Mum came home from Sunshine Hospital Dad only drank beers. Every time it got to the end of Sunday I counted another weekend without Scotch whisky. I counted five in a row. For all that time Merle slept quietly between his paper sheets. There were no sounds in the night, and in the mornings when Mum stood at the kitchen island and stirred sugar into her tea, her face was as clear as the moon.

But when I stood in the yard of Nineteen Emu and looked into the sky, just before it turned to night, I could see a giant shadow
full of tiny squares we were too big to swim through. Something was coming down over the house like a net.

Mum sucked on her puffer and went to work at Westlake and brought home slices for Robby and me that only she ate. Cherry and coconut and lemon, she sat on her blue kitchen couch, coconut rain falling over the covers of
Death on the Nile
. Her breathing tubes were clear. At the hospital the nurse took the throat vacuum and did to her channels what Dad did to the carpets. There was no dust on her tentacles and they waved freely; she was back at the start of the build-up.

On Saturday morning of the sixth weekend I was drying the dishes with Mum when the telephone rang. Mum picked it up.

‘Hello, Rodney, nice to hear your voice,’ she said. ‘Oh no, nothing serious, I hope? . . . Of course . . . Yes, love, I’ll just get him.’ She put the telephone down on the bench, her forehead creased with lines, and called, ‘Gav? Gav! Your brother’s on the phone.’

Dad came in from behind the house where he’d been working on the hot-water box. The flame kept going out because the pilot was gone. ‘Rodney?’ he asked Mum, as if it was a surprise. Mum nodded, passing him the telephone. Dad put it to his ear. Uncle Rodney was the brother Dad spoke to the most. Dad was the oldest of the four and Uncle Rodney was just under.

‘G’day, Rod . . .’ Dad said, a smile in his voice. Then, as he listened, I saw the smile and the pink and the brown and the red and the black fall down from his face into the neck of his shirt. ‘Jesus . . . Bloody Steve. Oh, Christ.’ He shook his
head, back and forth as he listened. ‘Was only a matter of time . . . Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for calling, Rodney. Yes, they’re fine . . . Not right now, mate. I’ll ring you tomorrow.’ He put the telephone back into the receiver.

‘What is it, Gav?’ Mum asked, looking worried.

‘Steve had an accident,’ Dad answered. Steve was the brother he never saw. He did time for guns. Dad said he used to go fishing with Steve and he never knew about the guns. Steve stored them in the back of his ute in a silver box along with a bucket of speed, and the police weren’t even looking for them when they found them – they were looking for stolen tools and they found the guns and the bucket instead.

‘What happened?’ asked Mum.

‘He hit a tree in his ute.’

‘Oh no. When, love?’

‘Early this morning.’

‘Is he okay?’

I had never seen my dad’s tears fall before, but he didn’t have time to close the gates and one escaped. It came out his eye and stopped at his cheek. ‘He’s dead,’ he said.

‘Oh, Gav . . .’ Mum touched his shoulder. Dad pulled away as if she’d burned him.

‘Steve was a prick,’ said Dad, walking back outside. ‘Him and bloody Ray. Nothing fucken changes.’ Soon Mum and me heard hammering from the hot-water box.

Once I heard Mum talking to Pop Flick on the telephone about Ray, another one of Dad’s brothers.

‘Oh no, Pop, I know, terrible . . .’ she said. ‘Are they saying he raped her? Are they sure? . . . That’s no good. Poor Ray.
I suppose I’m glad he’s put away . . . I know . . . But still, I can’t help but feel for him. No . . . shocking . . . I know, I know that.’

‘What’s raped?’ I asked Mum after she got off the telephone.

‘It’s nothing, Jimmy. You shouldn’t be listening when I’m on the phone.’

‘What’s raped? I should know, Mum. If it’s a word then I should know the meaning. What’s raped? I should know, Mum. I –’

‘Alright, Jimmy, alright! Your father’s brother Ray went to jail because he hurt a girl. He hurt two girls, alright?’

‘Is raped hurting?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Then why didn’t you say to Pop Flick that you are glad Uncle Ray is in jail for
hurting
? Why didn’t you say that?’

‘Because . . .’ Mum took a breath. ‘Because raping is hurting a person in a particular way.’

‘What way?’

‘A bad way. The worst way, Jimmy.’

‘What way?’

‘It’s when a person forces themselves onto another person. That’s what Uncle Ray did. He did it to two girls and now he’s going to jail.’

‘Did he know the two girls?’

She sighed. ‘I don’t know, Jim. I don’t know anything about them.’

I watched as Mum took off her apron. She stood pulling at her lip. Raping. ‘Alright, Mum. That’s what Uncle Ray did.’

‘Yes, that’s what he did. Now forget about it. Let’s eat lunch.’

I only met Uncle Ray once, at a Christmas at Pop Flick’s. His nose was a lump like a mushroom and his eye had a tear down one side. A piece of his network was missing. Somebody
took it from him. Maybe he was looking for it in the two girls. Maybe raping was a search.

‘Why did that happen to Steve?’ I asked Mum.

‘Oh, Jimmy,’ she sighed. ‘Steve was a tough case.’