Swallow the Air (2 page)

We go cloud busting, Billy and me, down at the beach, belly up to the big sky. We make rainbows that pour out from our heads, squinting our eyes into the gathering. Fairy flossed pincushion clouds explode. We hold each other's hand; squeeze really hard to build up the biggest brightest rainbow and Bang! Shoot it up to the sky, bursting cloud suds that scatter, escaping into the air alive.

We toss our bodies off the eelgrass-covered dunes and race down to the shore where seaweed beads trace the waterline. Little bronze teardrops – we bust them too. Bubble-wrapped pennies.

We collect pipis, squirming our heels into the shallow water, digging deeper under the sandy foam. Reaching down for our prize, we find lantern shells, cockles, and sometimes periwinkles,
bleached white. We snatch them up, filling our pockets. We find shark egg capsules like dried out leather corkscrews and cuttlebones and sand snail skeletons, and branches, petrified to stone. We find sherbet-coloured coral clumps, sponge tentacles and sea mats, and bluebottles – we bust them with a stick. We find weed ringlet doll wigs and strings of brown pearls; I wear them as bracelets. We get drunk on the salt air and laughter. We dance, wiggling our bottoms from the dunes' height. We crash into the surf, we swim, we dive, and we tumble. We empty our lungs and weigh ourselves cross-legged to the seabed. There we have tea parties underwater. Quickly, before we swim up for mouthfuls of air.

I'm not scared of the ocean, that doesn't come until later. When we're kids we have no fear, it gets sucked out in the rips. We swim with the current, like breeding turtles and hidden jellyfish, as we drift out onto the shore.

We climb the dunes again, covered in sticky sand and sea gifts. We ride home and string up dry sea urchins at our window. We break open our pipis and Mum places each half under the grill or fries them in the saucepan, with onion
and tomatoes. We empty our pockets and line the seashells along the windowsill. Mum starts on about the saucepans; she wants to tell us stories even though we know most of them off by heart, over and over, every detail. The saucepans, she says, the best bloody saucepans.

Billy and me sit at the window, watching Mum while she fries and begins. I'm still busting clouds through the kitchen pane, as they pass over the roof guttering and burst quietly in my rainbow.

‘It was Goulburn, 1967,' Mum would begin.

‘Where's that?' we'd say.

‘Somewhere far away, a Goulburn that doesn't exist anymore,' she'd answer and carry on with her story.

Anyway, Goulburn, '67. All my brothers and sisters had been put into missions by then, except Fred who went and lived with my mother's sister. And me, I was with my mother, probably cos my skin's real dark, see – but that's another story, you don't need to know that. So old Mum and me were sent to Goulburn from the river, to live in these little flats. Tiny things, flatettes or something.
Mum was working for a real nice family, at the house cooking and cleaning; they were so nice to Mum. I would go to work with her, used to sit outside and play and wait for her to finish.

When we came home Mum would throw her feet up on the balcony rail, roll off her stockings and smoke her cigarettes in the sun. Maybe chat with the other women, but most of them were messed up, climbing those walls, trying to forget. It wasn't a good time for the women, losing their children.

Anyway, all the women folk were sitting up there this hot afternoon when down on the path arrived this white man, all suited up. Mum called down to him, I don't know why, she didn't know him. I remember she said, ‘Hey there, mister, what you got there?'

A box was tucked under his arm. He looked up at us all and smiled. He come dashing up the stairwell and out onto our balcony. I think he would've been the only white person to ever step up there. He was smooth. ‘Good afternoon to you, ladies, I am carrying in this box, the best saucepans in the land.'

Mum drew back on her cigarette and stubbed it out in the tin. ‘Give us a look then.'

The suit opened up the box and arranged the saucepans on the balcony, the sun making the steel shine and twinkle. They were magical. All the women whooped and whooed. The saucepans really were perfect. Five different size pans and a Dutch oven, for cakes. Strong, black, grooved handles on the sides and the lids, the real deal.

‘How much?' Mum said, getting straight to the point.

The suit started up then on his big speech: Rena Ware, 18/10, only the best, and this and that, lifetime guarantee, all that sort of stuff.

The women started laughing. They knew what the punch line was going to be, nothing that they could afford, ever. Their laughter cascaded over the balcony rails as they followed each other back into the shade of their rooms.

‘Steady on there, Alice, you got a little one to feed there too!' they said, seeing Mum entranced, watching his mouth move and the sun bouncing off the pans.

He told her the price, something ridiculous, and Mum didn't even flinch. She lit up another fag, puffed away. I think he was surprised, maybe relieved she didn't throw him out. He rounded up
his speech and Mum just sat there as he packed up the saucepans.

‘You not gunna let me buy em then?' Mum said, blowing smoke over our heads.

‘Would you like to, Miss?'

‘Of course I bloody do, wouldna sat here waiting for you to finish if I didn't!'

Mum told him then that she couldn't afford it, but she wanted them. So they made a deal. Samuel, the travelling salesman, would come by once a month, when money would come from the family, and take a payment each time.

Mum worked extra hours from then on, sometimes taking home the ironing, hoping to get a little more from the lady of the house. And she did, just enough. And Samuel would come round and chat with Mum and the other ladies and bring sweets for me. He and Mum would be chatting and drinking tea in the lounge until it got dark outside. They were friends after all that time.

Three years and seven months it took her. When Samuel came round on his last visit, with a box under his arm, just like the first time, Mum smiled big. He came into the flat and placed the box on the kitchen bench.

‘Open it,' he said to Mum, and smiled down at me and winked.

Mum pressed her hands down the sides of her uniform then folded open the flaps and lifted out each saucepan, weighing it in her hands, squinting over at Samuel, puzzled. With each lid she pulled off, her tears gathered and fell.

‘What is it, what is it?' I was saying as I pulled a chair up against the bench and could see then in one pan was a big leg of meat, under another lid potatoes and carrots, a shiny chopping knife, then a bunch of eggs, then bread. And in the Dutch oven, a wonky looking steamed pudding. Mum was crying too much to laugh at the cake.

‘I haven't got a hand for baking yet. Hope you don't mind I tested it out.'

Mum just shook her head; she couldn't say a word and Samuel understood. He put on his smart hat, tilting the brim at Mum, and as he left the doorway, he said, ‘Good day to you, Alice. Good day, young lady.'

And when Mum passed, she gave the pots to me.

When our mother finished her story she'd be crying too, tiny streams down her cheekbones. I knew she would hock everything we'd ever own, except the only thing that mattered, five sizeranged saucepans, with Dutch oven. Still in their hard case, only a few handles chipped.

I run my fingertips over fingerprints now, over years, generations. They haven't changed much; they still smell of friendship. I suppose that to my nanna, Samuel was much like a cloud buster. Letting in the sun, some hope, the rainbow had been their friendship. And I suppose that to Mum, Samuel was someone who she wanted to be around, like a blue sky. For Samuel, my mum and Nanna, I don't know, maybe the exchange
was
even, and maybe when those clouds burst open, he got to feel the rain. A cleansing rain, and maybe that was enough.

Billy got a job on the milk run and Aunty got pissed to celebrate. It felt like everything was a celebration then: when I got the year-eight art prize at school, when Aunty had a good day on the pokies, when we had Chinese food. It seemed just about anything called for celebration. With Aunty there, every night was toasted. We were happy when Aunty was happy, laughing and yarning and dancing around the yard. She'd be flat on the grass and still dancing in her head, eyes glazed with an absence, a bliss. I imagined her as an angel, laying out her wings beneath the satellites of the sky. There she soared.

I could gaze out on that backyard for hours, patterning circles in the grass, like a cat ready to pounce. Sunsets were for staring at across the long sweep of disorder, over rooftops where the day would snigger and slowly hide its semi-circle of tangerine.

‘I'm goin out, ya kids be good for ya aunnie, right?'

‘Yeah, Aunty,' Billy called from the fridge door, ‘we be good.'

From the back steps I watched the loose heel of her stiletto drag along the hall carpet and disappear through the door frame, like an arm that's been slept on all night, all paralysed at the bend. Aunty was off again to see her boyfriend or whatever she confessed him to be. I followed an invisible line back from where she'd stumbled from the mirrored basin. Where she'd drawn cocksucker red lipstick over her black lips in worship of her prince.

Aunty got a boyfriend. Skin just like mine. I'd hear Aunty cry all the time. Fists of black hair. Cheek to the stove. Don't know when my real Aunty is gunna come home.

‘I'm goin for a walk, Billy, back soon.'

‘Yeah, watcha back for the boogie man!'

Billy grunted in his thin belly before filling it with a bong. I slipped through the broken palings that the council were supposed to fix years ago, a splinter hiding its shard between my forefinger and thumb. Behind me I could hear Billy pop the
cone and cough on his heartache, lunging back unlove.

Paradise Parade, built over the old Paradise Abattoir, bore two long rows of housing commission flats, unregistered cars, busted prams and echoes of broken dreams, all crammed into our own special section of Woonona Beach. Paradise, ha! Way down, past the flags and half a million dollar beachfronts, there hid a little slice of scum. From the wrong side of the creek, we'd had the privilege of savouring the last crumbs of beachfront property. Soon they'd demolish all the fibro and move us mob out to the western suburbs. For now we were to be satisfied with the elitist postcode and our anonymity.

The cycleway was the only thing that bound us to the estate properties that bred rapidly from the dozed clay beds. Big terracotta storage boxes.
Here is my wife and these are my children and this is Bingo the dog, oh, and let me show you the patio.

The liquorice ocean blew its chilly Pacific spray against my presence, each quivered lip caught in the undercurrent of a quarter moon. She drew back her sea's crown and swallowed my fear. We were like the morning ladies, doing tai chi: out
with the black clouds, in with the white. Clean.

I squinted through the darkened clouds, eyeing the serpentine cement path. Out of sight the sounds syncopated with the tide, like a basketball bounced against a car bonnet – the compressing of air and the jolt of metal. I drew behind a bottlebrush bush and pulled back a fresh branch, bending on bracket knees, trying to get a glance. The hard glow of suburbia cast patterns of destitute light on the openness. Nothing. The sounds twisted louder over my ears and through it I heard someone scream. The lads were out. I strained to see what was happening.

I once knew the cycleway well. Billy and me would ride this way to Bellambi Beach when we were kids, when the nor-easterly currents would get rounded into the southern bend of the beach. There, at the mouth of the creek we'd find blue swimmer crabs for cooking up. Only certain times of the year you could find the crabs though, all the months with the letter
r
in them Mum used to say. It wasn't often too that the channel would be opened up to the beach and as we got older we began to feel like we didn't belong on that side of the creek either. Trailing behind
the graffiti tags strewn among the grey.
‘Mull up lads ... fuck off coons.'

I began to hide my skin from the other beach, from this stretch of cycleway. There were bends all through this part, I remembered. They wouldn't see me, I thought. I'd run along the side of the path and hide in the dune entrance further up near the creek.
Ready set ... Keep your knees bent, don't look, hear the voices, keep low, not far, not far, quiet, here it is...
down.

‘See that man, some little friggin spyin broad ...
SEE THAT!'

I watched him tilt with his shadow. He was alone, still against the light crashing on hurling bodies. His mates were too busy taking apart one of the kids – probably one of the dope runners ripped them off. Payback, slamming his rag doll body between the Datsun panel and Nike.

I hid deep in the scrub and tried to see through the condensation of screams. The line of white press-studs that ran down the side of his tracksuit caught the moonlight as each leg strode toward the walkway. I slid under the dune fencing and doubled myself into the pandanus branches. I am invisible, I am earth, I am sand.

‘Oy, ya little coon bitch, what tha fuck do ya think ya doin?'

The bottle dropped to his side, dribbling onto the sand. My eyes flickered at his slippery face, his fat bottom lip tucked under his front teeth, sliding off, sucking the dregs of beer, drawing a ball of spit, glaring sliver-eyed at my slightness.

I scrambled up and ran toward the water; my feet cupped the dunes and spat the damp sand sideways, my arms flailing the whipping southerly. The panting of terror drew behind me as my shirt gave way and dumped me over, heavy kneecaps, hands and sand tormenting. We're down, we're stopped, and a blade caresses my cheek like a sympathetic breeze.

‘This gunna show ya where ya don't belong dumb black bitch.'

The popping buttons over my back take me elsewhere. Bubble wrap. Lemonade burps as Billy and me push each plastic blister between finger and thumb, choking on each other's laughter. Popping giggles silence violent grunts.

He ends it mutely and clips back his buttons: pop ... pop ... pop. I forget to feel the blade swim through my palm, shallow, seeping blood.

I do not nourish, I do not even turn over, not even when he leaves, this be my death, where I quietly finger the softness of my tongue.