White Light (3 page)

T
his is my story about the bulldozer. I reckon they're awesome. Not like my brother's little toy ones mucking about in the sandpit. But real, monstrous, dirty big bulldozers with gears and cogs and that caterpillar tread that would smash your bones to smithereens if you stood in its way. One is building a road up past our house.

I wish my dad would buy a bulldozer. I could keep it in the backyard and play on it.

In my backyard is a Hills Hoist squealing slowly in the breeze like a buckled windmill. Its arms are crooked from too much swinging, although I think it's because the washing is too heavy. That is all I want to say about my backyard.

A bulldozer wouldn't really fit in it.

The bulldozer parks each day on the hill near our house. And a grader. And a steamroller, with a big, shiny wheel like a rolling pin. They are making the road.

At the bottom of the hill is the ‘bush'. It is not really the bush but it is called the bush because it is bushy. There is a creek with tadpoles in it. At the end of the bush the creek and the tadpoles go down a pipe. If you catch them in a jar then hold them up to the light you can see the veins in their tails. If you pour them on the ground they wriggle. Then they stop wriggling and are boring.

The bulldozer at the top of the hill has brown grease oozing out of its axles. It is orange. Orange is my favourite colour because that is the colour of bulldozers. Its blade is cold and smooth. On weekends, kids climb on the bulldozer and muck around. They pretend to drive it and make engine noises. I have to stretch so far to reach the pedals my legs hurt.

We watch the bulldozer making the road from the top of the hill. A brown man with muscles like a frog pulls the levers. There is another hill made of clay pushed aside by the bulldozer. From the top you can see and smell new houses.

One morning before Sunday school I get up early and put on my best dress. I race up the road for a quick muck around on the hill. There is no one else there and I am kind of invisible. I climb aboard my bulldozer. It smells sweet of grease and oil. I push knobs, pull levers, turn the wheel, stretch for pedals, make engine noises with my mouth, when—CLUNK—something goes clunk. It is moving. It is alive. I jump to the ground. I watch my bulldozer roll, slowly at first, then faster, down hill and over—oh, did I forget to mention the embankment?—over the embankment. My bulldozer does a few cartwheels. After a while there is peace and quiet. I look over the edge of the embankment. The bulldozer is on its back where the tadpoles were. It looks dead, all mangled and still.

There is mud on my dress. I run for it. Down the road, through my back door, into my room. If anyone sees my dirty dress, I'll cop it. They will put two and two together and I will go to jail. Even when I stop running, my heart is still catching up. I hide my dirty dress in the bottom of the wardrobe. Put on my pyjamas. Get into bed. Snore a bit.

After a while my father yells for us to all get up and get dressed for Sunday school.

‘Come on, no dawdling now.'

My heart starts running again. I get up and find a nice clean dress. I yawn a lot. Luckily my hair is still tousled. No one knows that I am a criminal. I eat two breakfasts.

‘Righto you lot, in the car,' my father yells. ‘And no fiddling.'

He likes to yell. It gets us going. My brother and I fight for the front seat. I win. I fiddle. Fiddle with the buttons, push, pull, squirt water on the windscreen, honk the horn, turn the wheel, honk the horn. By accident, I pull the lever with a spring in it. The lever goes down. Something goes clunk again. It looks like I have not learnt my lesson. Dad yells. I look up. The house is moving. I am rolling backwards. Dad is running alongside the car. He opens the door. He looks funny as he hops on one leg. He falls in and stamps on the brake as if he is killing a spider. I get a clip over the ear but that is fair. I have to sit in the back seat. My ear stays hot.

After a few days everyone has forgotten about the bulldozer.

I grow up a bit.

Then there is a man in a suit at the front door mumbling to my mother.

‘Jennifer, come here please,' she calls.

She never says please. This means I am going to jail now. I tell the man the truth. Yes, I sometimes play on the big machines, so do all the other kids. My favourite is the grader. No, I never played there on Sunday morning. No, I don't know how the bulldozer got in the bush at the bottom of the hill. The man says a word. He says, ‘Liar.' I cry. This makes my mum mad. She says, ‘Jennifer was with us at church last Sunday morning, as she is every week. It could have been any of the neighbourhood children. How dare you accuse… she would never…'

Her voice sounds like iron filings. I am a magnet.

The man leaves with his red face. His tyres go squeak on the road. My mum wins. I go into the backyard to swing on the washing line and be invisible for a while. I notice my Sunday school dress flapping there with no mud on it.

We are eating dinner. Mum and Dad are having a serious chat. I hide my broccoli under some lettuce. I look up once or twice and watch my dad putting two and two and two together. He glares at the salt. My brother kicks me under the table. This time I let him. I wonder when the man in the suit will come back to take me to jail. I hear Dad say they are going to build new houses down the bush when the road is finished. I want to say something like where will the tadpoles live? But it is better to keep quiet. There is no dessert. That is fair.

No one in our house ever mentions the bulldozer again.

A
n incidental character in a story by Morris Lurie is said to have undertaken a thesis on the popular board game,
Monopoly
. I find this disturbing, how life can imitate fiction, because I myself have recently completed such an exegesis and, finding little of academic or theoretical interest in the literature, was under the misapprehension that I was doing original research. Not so, it seems. Lurie has pipped me at the post.

Monopoly
. It is an intriguing topic. Personally, I take something of an analytical approach to the psychosocial metaphors of the game. Let us say, for example, that I am the Boot and you are the Racing Car. Nothing odd there. I like boots. And you? You start. After our preliminary circumnambulation of the board, you throw a three plus a five. Euston Road. You buy. I throw a one and a three. Income Tax. Ten percent. I do not mind. Your turn will come. Resign yourself; sooner or later everyone has to pay income tax. Your next throw of the dice adds up to five. Whitehall. You buy. I have no anecdote concerning Whitehall. My turn. The dice feel light as a pair of wren's eggs in my hand. At first glance, they seem to display a veritable bevy of dots. Nine. Whitehall. I pay the rent. Your Racing Car accelerates to the wishing well of the Community Chest. You draw a card: Advance to Mayfair. Whacko, you crow. And slap down the cash. My boot plods its way to Free Parking. No joy there. Just tyre marks on the road and broken glass in the gutter. You collect two hundred dollars as you pass Go and promptly invest it in the acquisition of a railway station. Surely you can do no worse than the current government. At the opposite end of the defined world I land on Fenchurch but I am a more selective investor and choose not to purchase. I see myself operating at the more up-market end of the spectrum, which may explain my pique at Mayfair.

With a six, you snap up Pall Mall. I tell you the story of how once, when visiting the real Pall Mall, a young English waif begged me for money to buy chips. Instead, I offered her an apple, which she threw at my head. Interesting? No. My go. Oh. I throw a five and as a consequence, I land and am sent, of all places, directly to jail You throw a mere three and are thus in the position of being able to purchase Northumberland Avenue. You do. And place a house on each limb of this purple tri-unity.

Rather than pay the fine, I declare a penchant for chancing my arm. Call me wild, call me reckless but I hope to throw a double and therefore get out of jail free. I do not. Next, you buy The Strand. I throw a one and six. You buy Fenchurch. I throw a six and twirling two. Time enough to mend my broken spectacles with an old Band-Aid. You buy Piccadilly, with all its pigeons. I note, with some satisfaction, your cash flow is looking a bit thin. It's the old boom and bust cycle. I pay the fine. You see how in the brief interlude while I have been languishing on remand, possessing little more than the wits I was born with, you have turned into an all-devouring property mogul. An enemy of the people. You own, let's list them: two railway stations, Euston Road, Whitehall, Pall Mall, Northumberland Avenue, The Strand, Piccadilly and Mayfair. Already a widening social rift has split the good nature and sense of trust that was originally between us. Healthy competition gone sour. I contemplate stealing from the Bank, but Durkheim (is it?) says this is a natural response after a period of incarceration.

On my release from prison, I land on one of your estates (with attendant development in progress). An outlandish price at this end of the property market. I remember when the neighbourhood amounted to little more than a pile of beans. I still have enough floating capital to pay the rent. From my share of the general booty of $15,140 I have remained a model of frugality. However, I now hate you. I want to vandalise all your innocent suits. I want to break your windows, smash your crockery, poison your pets.

The game proceeds. The night is long. Your tycoon's empire expands. In my poverty, I plot my leap-frogging way around the board, pausing clumsily on the refuge islands of Chance and Community Chest. I have become a burden on society. A threat to your peace of mind. You move me on. My one simple ambition: to return to my roots, to scrimp and save enough to put a down payment on Old Kent Road, and perhaps a new pair of glasses. Thus, from humble beginnings. But the vicissitudes of life are not so simple. Social justice is a myth. Eventually, I bow to my recidivist nature and return to jail. Safe. Once in jug, I plot and plan. You think I am being defeatist. I do acknowledge the point, however, that this game is called
Monopoly
and not
Social Rift
. On we go unto our needle's eye.

Thus you can see the subtle analogies that a game of chance affords the dedicated student. Such a wealth of material cannot be ignored in the cause of research. The poetry of loaded dice and chance. Genetic predisposition versus social engineering. Such issues imply some point of comparison, even bequeath meaning.

Let me add as a postscript, that, at the conclusion of my research and upon the submission of my thesis (which I pray will be published by Routledge at the turn of the decade) I ran from the faculty office screeching for joy and for liberty. I flung my
Monopoly
board from the nearest balcony, not caring who it struck. Paper money drifting on the wind. Red hotels raining down. The game is over, the exegesis is over, welcome the jubilant freedom of ruin.

W
hen I was much littler than I am now, our hot water system blew up and the house filled with steam. I thought a car had crashed into the house, the noise of it was that loud. You couldn't even see the walls. Hot rain dripped off the ceiling as the water went everywhere, gushing out of a broken pipe, drenching the clothes hanging off the backs of chairs.

Mum ran around bumping into things, yelling, ‘Jayden, Bianca, wake up. Get out of the house.'

The lights still worked and, when we got out of bed, it was like wandering around in a warm fog. Mum looked like a soggy ghost coming out of the mist.

When she realised that a car hadn't crashed through the house and that the hot water system had blown up, she sat down on the floor with Bianca in her arms and cried. It was just one more thing. Dad, Bianca getting measles, something about a pink slip and some big bills and now this. It was too much. I opened a window to let the steam out. Piss off steam.

After the mist cleared and things began to dry out, Dad came round to dismantle the hot water service. That's what he called it—dismantling. The big tank looked like a robot dead in the front yard with all its innards stripped out. I crawled through it, where every noise echoed like a metal cave. I asked Dad if he would like to be invited in for dinner but he didn't say anything, just looked at the grease on his hands. Mum didn't say anything either, staring at us through the flywire of the front door. Then I asked him why he didn't want to live with us anymore.

‘I can't answer that at the moment, Jayden,' he said. ‘I have to get home.'

He packed up his tools and chucked them in the boot of his boss's car that he had borrowed, gunned the engine and took off. Home was a single room in the Family Hotel. It was a rough and scary place. Once, shots were fired through the windows from a real gun. The police were always being called. We hurried past there, walking to and from school. I always checked the windows for bullet holes. It was called the Family Hotel but we never saw too many families hanging about. Mum called it the Manson Family Hotel but I don't understand that. No one really felt like walking into the dingy dusk of the front bar to see how Dad was getting on. It was too depressing. And smelly.

He did not come back to pick up the tank, so we used it as a cubby house and a tunnel and a musical instrument that made a loud clanging noise like a copper bell when you whacked it with a broom handle. I broke the broom handle. That was one more thing also.

After the hot water tank blew up, Mum went to bed and stayed there for six days. I had to pour Corn Flakes out for me and Bianca for our dinner. Mum didn't eat much but then after a while she came good and cooked up a storm, even if she did stay in her pyjamas. Mashed potato and lemon delicious pudding with our own lemons. Things began to feel a bit better. It all had to do with money, she said, that's all. I offered her my pocket money although I was saving for a booster pack of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, but she said she couldn't accept it. Whew.

I thought if I could find a treasure, then Mum would be happy and we could buy a pink slip and all that other stuff she wanted. I went out into the backyard and dug a hole underneath the clothesline to look for gold. I didn't find any, even though I wished so hard and it wasn't even for me, but for Mum. I wanted to yell out Eureka! and throw my hat in the air. But first I would have to find my hat. I dug and I dug. The hole was deep enough to jump into and crouch beneath the surface of the earth. The ground so dry it was like baby powder. There were no worms, and no gold. All that happened was that Mum got cranky because she nearly fell into the hole when she was hanging out the washing.

Then the electricity was cut off, so it didn't matter if we had a hot water system or not. To wash us, she would use cold water and a flannel so rough it felt like sandpaper. Flannel is a funny word, like a girl's name. Living in candlelight was an adventure, for a while. Mum dragged us to the Social Security office and encouraged us to run around and muck up so they would serve her sooner and get rid of us. It didn't work. Everyone there looked miserable and we had to wait ages.

We left with nothing—Diddley squat—Mum called it, although I think it was probably too much to expect them to hand over a new hot water service. We couldn't have carried it anyway, judging by the size of the old one in our front yard. On the way home, pushing the stroller with Bianca in it up the big hill, Mum started crying again. I wished so hard she would stop. I helped push the stroller. She cried as we passed all the shops, as we crossed the crossing and especially as we passed the Family Hotel and the used car lot next door. I couldn't see any bullet holes. As we were passing the bad smells coming out of the door, hoping no one would call out, I spotted something. Something shiny, just sitting there on the footpath near a No Parking Any Time sign. I let go of Mum's hand and picked it up. Mum continued on with the stroller, blubbering tears and snot. I caught up.

‘Mum, what's this?' I held out my hand.

Her blubbering stopped. Slowly her hand closed over mine and she turned her head and kept walking, dragging me after her. Bianca was asleep in the stroller.

At home, we examined it like scientists. It was a gold ingot, Mum said. I got out my Super Sleuth magnifying glass and after we saw our giant fingerprints, we saw it had 2.5 oz stamped on the bottom of the little golden cube. We stared at it. No one asked where it came from or how it got there on the footpath, or whose it was. We just stared at it. For a few months, Mum was really happy.

***

So I took Bianca and Jayden to the city by train. It was an adventure for them to sit up looking out the windows, or playing hide-and-seek between the back-to-back seats. They examined every new passenger who got on. Let me say that, apart from keeping my eye on the kids, at no stage did my thoughts wander from the strange miracle of the ingot in my pocket, sitting with my keys and a tissue and a packet of lifesavers. A beautiful word—ingot. Bullion is another lovely word. I'd had to make certain my pockets did not have any holes. I could not bring myself to put it in a handbag in case it was snatched by someone.

A small part of me wondered where the ingot had come from, but only a very small part. Smaller still, the civic voice that told me to hand it in as lost property and hope for a reward. That was plan B. It's nice to have a plan. I suspect the ingot had more to do with the shots and the police that the Family Hotel attracted or maybe the used car lot next door. Or both. Or nothing. What on earth would something like that be doing sitting on the street? One of those little imponderables of the world, really. Like my father leaving home when I was nineteen. Not for any reason that I could see. I don't have a clear understanding of his relationship with my mother but they always gave the appearance of being happy. I can clearly remember the last words I ever heard him speak. They were: ‘Can you move your car?'

I only hope the children's father doesn't say anything so cruel.

‘Mum, what's this?'

I'll never forget the sight of it when Jayden opened his palm and held it up to me. It was like a lightning bolt. I knew instantly what it was, even though I'd only ever seen gold on television before. We kept it in the sugar bowl. A bit bigger than a die or is it dice? I can never tell. One morning I woke up early to find Jayden sitting at the table weighing it in his hand. Intermingled with my pride in him was a feeling of uneasiness. I made a cup of tea and we sat in bed trying not to talk about it.

‘It's not that important,' I said, really believing it.

Inside the Gold Exchange, a bundle of nerves, I approached the counter. Fifteen long steps from the door. The woman there, a proper Madam in a suit with gold cuff links, looked me up and down without changing her expression. Disdain.

‘Yes?'

‘I'd like to exchange some gold.'

‘Indeed,' said Madam, glancing at my jeans. ‘Show me the ring.'

It wasn't a question. Already she was looking elsewhere. Bitch. Jayden's nose left a smear on a glass display cabinet. Good.

‘It's not a ring. It's bullion.'

‘Oh.'

Her temperament changed immediately. She directed me to a gentleman at the end of a long counter.

He was perched on a pedestal, owlish behind a tall walnut desk like a judge's bench. I don't really know if it was a walnut desk, I just like the sound of it. Walnut. Ingot. Bullion. My knees were trembling and I badly wanted to wee. I had to reach up like a schoolgirl to hand it to him.

His eyebrows barely reacted. He inserted his little eyepiece into his socket and studied it. Nodding to himself. Saying ‘Mmm.' Saying he'd be back in a moment. His chair squeaked.

‘Where's he taking it?' Jayden asked. ‘Is he stealing it?'

‘It's all right. He'll bring it back.'

I was petrified. Any minute I half expected the police to burst in and arrest me. At this point Bianca loudly filled her nappy.

When he returned he held an envelope.

‘At today's market value, Madam, if you wish to proceed beyond an evaluation, this item would be redeemable for—.'

He handed me the envelope with a figure written on the front.

I almost fainted.

$2 680

I opened the envelope. Cash. Holy… I turned to leave.

‘Excuse me.'

My heart jumped. My bladder bursting.

‘Yes,' I squeaked, ‘I suppose you want to know where I got it from?'

‘Er, no, madam. I was speaking to my colleague.'

And he was. The stuck-up bitch down the other end looked up from polishing her cuff links. None of my business.

So we left. No questions asked. Outside the exchange, the delirious chaos of Martin Place, with the lunchtime lawyers and business people eating their sandwiches and feeding the pigeons.

Jayden tugged at my arm. ‘What are we going to do with my money?'

Hmm. It was his after all. He understood precisely both the letter and the spirit of the law of finders keepers. There were plenty of lawyers around to explain it if I didn't.

Shopping. We had a bang-up lunch. Chips and sauce for Bianca. Gourmet sandwiches for us. I did not get cross when Jayden couldn't finish his and threw his crusts on the floor. Then he bought a soft toy for his sister, a rhinoceros and ‘something for you, Mum'. I chose a silk top with a Chinese pattern from DJs. He wanted to buy me a pink slip too, but I told him I had nothing to wear it under. Plus he bought a new booster pack of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, the significance of which I don't pretend to appreciate. He also wanted a new bicycle, but I told him it would be too difficult to carry. We'll get one at home. I could see the money happily disappearing, and why not? It wasn't ours. It was probably cursed. We wandered the street, drifting in and out of shops. It was a different experience from the usual window daydreams.

‘Do you know what would make me really happy?'

‘What's that, Jay?'

‘A hot bath.'

Our legs were exhausted. I turned the stroller with its wonky wheel, heading towards the station.

‘Are you happy, Mum?' he asked.

‘I don't know. I've had a nice day.'

‘You don't know if you're happy or not?'

He sounded shocked, so I smiled tiredly and gave a little shrug.