Loving, Faithful Animal (9 page)

I would, her dad told her, taking a raw chomp out of one to make her squeal. But it was the pine mushies they were mostly after anyway, a poisonous-looking orange and if you weren't careful and broke the gills they stained your hands like monster blood.

He didn't mind. He was different out there. Easier. Funny, even, telling her his nonsense jokes.

Alright missy, you tell me: what would you rather be or a policeman? A question that called for no sensible answer.

At first it stumped her, but then she caught on: I'd rather be a Pollywaffle. An octopus's walking stick.

But then he'd go all serious. Don't you ever go picking these without me, you hear? You get mixed up, pick the wrong kind, you'll go to sleep and never wake up again.

She'd shook her head for no as he carefully swept back the needles and twisted the thing up by the stalk, placing the prize into her spread hands so that she could deliver it to the newspaper-lined basket. Brushing her fingertips along the gills on the way: monster blood.

At home he cooked them up with salt and browned butter, stinking the house out till it smelled rich and earthy as a burrow. And though they may as well have been slugs for how slimy they were—and how they tasted, for that matter—she'd pretended they were just as good as marshmallows and eaten them anyway, as many bites as she could stand, because she wanted him to know that she liked the things he liked. Because she wanted to prove,
conclusively
, and because she didn't want to be left behind the next time he went out swinging that basket to the pines.

But not long after she'd started school his gatherings turned into wanderings, and his wanderings turned into
fucked-off-agains
—and these
fucked-offs
might be measured in days or in weeks. Then later, in months, spanning birthdays and holidays. And it wasn't always easy to tell which would be which when he went out the door. Because at first, when he was starting to go bad, all he ever took was his wallet. Though sometimes her mother would raise her eyebrows as the flyscreen banged closed behind him, and she'd mouth the word
Go
, so Lani would, right after him, one night bolting out in her summer pyjamas and purple rabbit slippers. Earlier there'd been a fight, and a few broken things made of glass, so she wasn't allowed to walk in the kitchen, and she didn't properly remember the rest of what had happened in there. After a while all those squalls had rolled into one another. But she remembers scarpering outside, that particular evening. How it had just finished raining, the world misty-quiet and grey with the last of the light, the insects on pause and the dirt road trickling with little errant streams. She pelted along it and when she caught her father he pulled up sharp, whirled around on her.

Go home, he said, pointing back to where home was or should be.

She could feel the wetness of the road soaking up through her slippers. Heard her voice shake when she answered him, I'll go home if you go home.

Not going to happen, Kiddo. He turned and kept walking, and she shadowed him.

Jesus, he said. Your mother put you up to this, didn't she? You should be in bed.

She had been put up to it, but Lani said nothing. Just ghosted alongside him, a smatter of steps for each of his long strides, the night coming down quiet around them and their road rising gently to meet the highway. Clouds raced across the face of the moon, veiling and unveiling it, though no breeze found them down there on earth.

How far is it?

How far is what?

Where we're going? She asked only to say something; she knew where he was headed—or had been, before she caught him. The station, which stood a little way out of town, where trains rarely found reason to stop. He would wait there, two hours, six hours, however long. Or maybe he'd hitch to Melbourne with one of the trucks, or someone driving back from a holiday up north.

But tonight he said, Oh, bloody hell. A man can't even take a frigging walk. And this time, at least, he turned for home. The road had drunk up the rain and was mucky in places. He looked down at her feet and so did she, at the bedraggled ears of her slippers. No chance of those coming back into the house.

I suppose you'll want to be carried now.

She did want that—her feet were pinging with the icy needles that arrive shortly before numbness. But it seemed important to say no, and so she said no, and he didn't fight her on it, accepting her refusal with a nod and a cough.

Her father was slower, walking back. No timetable in his head, no train to make or to miss. Lani kept pace with him easily, slopping along in her ruined slippers, triumphant. From somewhere came the gurgle of frogtalk. She wanted to say something too, but couldn't think what. Something encouraging. When nothing came to her she took hold of his jacket sleeve to let him know that there were no hard feelings.

There would be many nights afterwards where she could not turn him around, where there was nothing she could say or do to shame the rage out of him, bring him home. The last time she even tried—though she was thirteen then, and had more or less given up on him by that stage—she shadowed him towards the highway, silent except for when she asked him for a cigarette and he rolled one for her in the pitch dark. They bobbed along, closer in gait now, her legs nearly as long as his, and in place of talk there was the hiss and flare of tobacco, the twin glowing ends that seemed conversation enough, until she felt the road sloping up beneath her feet and she told him: It's me who cops it, you know? When you're not around.

Even in the dark he wouldn't look at her. She could tell that, hear it. His head still turned highway-ward, his voice aimed down at the road when he said, I know, love. I'm sorry. But there isn't much I can do about it, hey.

She let him walk on alone to the station that would sometimes dream up a train for him to leave on.

She squints towards the stand of pines. Those mushrooms don't grow there anymore. Either kind. She's looked. Maybe the weather is wrong for them. Or maybe they do grow there, and something else always gets to them first. That'd be right.

Will, of course he's found something better to do, somebody more interesting to do it with. Those stories he has of trekking all over the South Island. Hitching most of the ride with a couple of Maori punk girls in an old converted ambulance, getting nipped at by their contraband pet stoat, Baby Marmite. Breakfasts of stolen servo pastries—microwaved, they were that cocky. Night swimming stoned under cold stars and falling asleep to the thrash of the ocean. He still wears a jagged seal tooth around his neck, scooped up from the black sand at Piha. Crabeater,
crenulate
d
; like a lick of flame carved from bone, threaded onto leather. That same beach had later snapped him from the strap of a board and flung him into the rocks. Two weeks in a coma, he'd told her, and now the only thing that could scare him was the thought of ever being forced to lie that still again.

Can't be much better being here, she'd answered, petulant. Knowing it wasn't his choice to be: he'll leave when he can, and even if he stays long enough he
'
ll get bored of her. The furthest she
'
s ever been in her life is Lakes Entrance, which Ru—only little then—summed up as looking better in fridge magnets.

The other options for tonight are too bleak to ponder. Rage with mum, Monopoly with Ru. If she'd planned ahead she could've snuck a lift to the city, bringing down seven shades of strife at home, but it was too late for that anyway, she's stuck here now.

She mouths the words for a poem Mim had tricked her into learning by heart. (Five minutes, Lah. How long is five minutes? Just as long as it takes Maud to get into the garden, love; on you go.) A distraction Lani later used with Ru when the folks were in demolition mode. She'll give Will until
larkspur
. She meanders through it four times before she hears the thrum of the Honda, and a moment later Will crests the rise.

He props the bike and falls into the shade beside her, still fumbling with his helmet. Sorry, he says. Got called in on Dad duty. When he pulls the helmet off she sees the barbell has been knocked from his brow, the skin there split like soft fruit.

She shakes the box of pills at him for hello. Lose a fight?

Just a footy match, he grins. You get the names of those?

He'll care?

Will shrugs. Aiden, I reckon he'll care. Everyone else—most people will just take whatever they're given.

Okay, well. This one's Valium, definitely, and this is temazepam—pretty much the same, isn't it? And I don't know what these little shits are. She spills a few out into her palm and he shrugs again.

But they're all benzos, right?

I guess, yeah.

Not exactly social stuff but like I said, people out here will just swallow—that's if we're even headed to the same party. Those the only shoes you got?

Telling him to go chase himself would be the right answer, she knows, but her mouth feels too dry, even to laugh.

Well, he says, uneasy now. So long as she doesn't conk out halfway, yeah? Oh, hey. I brought something.

From the bike's dusty pannier he takes out a little rocket-looking thing, red and silver. Soda thingumy, for whipped cream. She knows that much.

Used to be my nan's, he says, digging around in the pannier for a cardboard box of what look like miniature torpedoes. Let me get you set up, and he loads one into the soda-thing and twists until there's a muffled crack and hiss—whatever it is escaping from the tiny bomb. Condensation clouding then beading up the metal.

Laughing gas, like dentists use, Will explains. Like sucking the helium out of a balloon, yeah? But you just take it straight from the siphon. You'll want to be sitting down, probably.

Lani breathes as she's told, cold fog blooming in her lungs. Then tipping back just as the sky pulls away. Like plunging into a deep pool, somewhere down inside her own body. Towards the surface of herself she's aware of him. Above her, going
skksh tsh tsh
in her ear. Underwater noises, the whistle and tick of crays, yabbies, rivermud creatures. Peaceful. She could stay, down at the silty bottom. Doesn't want to leave, to come back. But back she comes, anyway. Floating up from that great depth and breaking surface in the paddock of summer grass, where he's stopped making the noises and her mouth has run drier still. When she opens her eyes she sees him watching her, the way a person might watch an animal dream, like she's a cat with twitching paws.

Why'd you do that? she asks him.

Huh?

Like crickets or something. She tries to make the noise,
sk sksh sksh.

I don't know. Someone did it for me once. It just makes it. I don't know. Nicer.

Can I go again?

Doesn't last long enough, does it? Here, I'll come with you. He feeds the siphon two of the bombs. Again the hush of air into the chamber, and he lets her take the first lungful. She hands the siphon up to him, and a moment later he's there beside her; she's sure she feels the dirt ripple when he falls back against it.

Back down in it, at the bottom of things, she remembers something. No, it's not remembering. More like going there. To something that has already happened and is still happening. Years ago. But now as well. People talking about her in the next room, wherever that room might be. And what they're saying, it's nothing, really—
what eventuates is the capacity, the tendency for remanence decay; you copy it ten, a dozen times
—
just auditory junk she's picked up, kept stashed up there for some unfathomable reason. Like a radio scanned in from somewhere, but she knows each word the instant before it's said. Something she's already dreamed, maybe. She feels the weight of Will's hand on her stomach, the twitch of her leg, the hauling up. And she fights it, needs to hear the rest, even if she can't make sense of it. Stirring the murky bottom, thrashing about down there for something she can wrap a hand around, but there's nothing, nothing solid enough to grasp, and she can't bring any of it to the surface, good or bad. By the time she comes back to the paddock, the sky, the Ark looming up over them, all the details have smudged away. There's just the leftover feel of it. A strange, sinister taste in her mouth.

Again? Will asks.

She shakes her head. I'm done, she says, venturing a leg out of the Ark's shadow to test the sun's bite.

We'll make a move then. In a minute. Just let me get my head straight. And they're quiet for a while in the lengthening shade.

*

The house stands well out from town, halfway to the next, and though she's never been taken there before, she knows it. Everyone does. Things go on out there. All sorts. Past what was once the reservoir: now just a stagnant pool with floating beer cans, rubbish, and the land around it a dumping ground for wrecked or stolen cars, all their ID numbers scratched away.

The way there is rutted by stubborn tree roots, and by tyres that churned it up in bad weather. Will threads the Honda around the worst of it, the road tossing the bike around, Lani's arse lifting from the pillion as they take the smaller potholes, dust powdering her shins. Shattered wing-mirrors wink out at her, flashing gold in the last of the sun, as though signalling for someone.

Long before they get in sight of the place, the party reaches out to meet them; the pulse of bass in the dirt, oily bonfire smoke in spite of the fire ban.

That'll bring pigs.

Cops?

Nah, actual pigs, he laughs. Yeah, cops.

The fire, it eats everything. As Lani and Will pull up, people are feeding it beer cartons and chairs and a pair of skate shoes someone was stupid or stoned enough to have taken off. They're melting at the bonfire's heart, like an offering. Sparks dancing up above the roof of the house.