- It's so familiar I can't remember where it came from, only that it's always been here. I suspect my father was the child who sat quietly in it, and once he'd outgrown the low chair, still he brought it with him, to this house. Looking closely, the wood of its arched arms are stippled with the tracks of tiny fingernails. (21)
- Everything is filled with stories, an old woman neighbour told me once, the same old woman neighbour, as it happens, who taught me to sew. This is when I was extremely little, too little to understand that most things don't mean exactly what they seem, that meaning is a flighty thing. (21-22)
- I wonder can you hear all the things I can't any more, all the things rendered soundless by familiarity, in the same way I could never smell my father's smell even though I know he must have smelled. The hum of the generator in the grocer's yard, the echo of feathers in the chimney pot where the jackdaws nest, my shilly-shally breaths and the rasping of my tarry lungs. I wonder can you see through the open curtains to the outline of continents on the moon. The moon oceans and moon mountains and lakes full of moon water. (24)
- It is spring in my dream. At first I think I know this innately, but of the things I think I innately know, I rarely do, I've only forgotten where they came from. And so I remember, it was the cut daffodils which showed me that it is spring. (26)
- Cloaked within the tasselled throw blanket, you are protected, and nothing bad can touch you. I hadn't expected there'd be so many commonplace, inanimate things in my father's house, my safe space, for you to be frightened of. Is it that they mean something else to you? Have you seen the ways they can be transformed into instruments of torture? ... I know you're disconcerted, but I do it because you have to learn to fathom your way through a world of which you are frightened, as I have learned. (31)
- I have inadvertently trained you, but you have trained me too. (34)
- Tonight, I dream of the place where you came from, the place where you were starved. (35)
- How can you be so unremittingly interested? How can every stone be worthy of tenderly sniffing, every clump of grass a source of fascination? How can this blade possibly smell new and different from that blad, and why is it that some require to be pissed upon, and others simply don't? I wish I'd been born with your capacity for wonder. I wouldn't mind living a shorter life if my short life could be as vivid as yours. (37)
- When I was a boy, the seasons seemed to exist more than they seem to exist now. For the past ten years at least, all year round, the meteorologist who reads the weather forecast has always said the same thing, and the picture at the end has always showed the same symbol. ... There haven't been any intensities of hot and cold or light and dark; instead it's been the same glum, tepid day over and over, and it's made me feel similarly seasonless. Apathetic when I should have been elated, drowsy when I should have been upset. Then, out of the blue, last winter grew tremendously cold. ... Where were you last winter? I find it hard to picture a time when we were simultaneously alive, yet separate. Now you are like a bonus limb. Now you are my third leg, an unlimping leg, and I am the eye you lost. (39-40)
- We'll go when the wind is high and the seas are storming, when the mud is fluid and deep and the rain so constant that the trees afford no shelter as they should, but instead send an onslaught of accumulated droplets down on our heads. Still we'll go this way, I promise. (44)
- Sometimes I see the sadness in you, the same sadness that's in me. It's in the way you sigh and stare and hang your head. It's in the way you never wholly let your guard down and take the world I've given you for granted. My sadness isn't a way I feel but a thing trapped inside the walls of my flesh, like a smog. It takes the sheen off everything. It rolls the world in soot. It saps the power from my limbs and presses my back into a stoop. (47)
- I'm not the kind of person who is able to do things, have I told you this already? I lie down and let life leave its footprints on me. (48)
- All the books I've read, they stack up too. The lines and passages bleed together. Sometimes I remember characters and think, just for a second, they were people I once knew. Sometimes I remember places and think, just for a second, that it's somewhere I once was. I never remember the titles or the author's name, but I remember the covers, I always remember the covers. ... But as for the words, the messages: I forget. And if I've been changed, so I change back again. (48-49)
- The first thing I see when I open my eyes in the morning, the view from the bedroom window at pillow level with the curtains open: the high wall behind the stone fence which conceals the grocer's generators, can you see too? Can you see the mass of ivy-leaved toadflax flourishing there? The flowers have violet petals with bright yellow lips, but they are lost amid the plethora of five-pronged leaves and spaghetti stems. Every night it grows and climbs with ravenous force. Every morning it fills a little more of our window. One day, will we open our eyes to nothing but toadflax? Still we'll claw our way through, I promise. (52)
- Now I see how you are drawn from Tawny Bay and back toward the hillslope, irresistibly. What are you thinking? It's hard to judge thought by the life in a tail, by the glint of light in a lonely peephole. And I wonder if it's the badgers. Is it the badgers, One Eye? Can you hear them calling you? (53)
- People are performing the summer on the summer's behalf, buying flip-flops and body-boards, tricking themselves into believing it's the season inside their TV sets instead, the one from the Australian soap operas. They are pretending, as though pretending alone might a miracle make. With such little sign of a change in season, how do the plants know it's the right time to flower? Because plants are smart in a way people aren't, never questioning the things they know nor searching for ways to disprove them. All along the road through the forest to the refinery, see how foxgloves split from their buds and tremble over the ditches. And when the weight of their waterlogged bonnets is too much, they keep into the road and their heads are crushed by cargo lorries into a pretty pink pulp. (61)
- I don't know what to do with you. I don't know whether I'm furious or frightened or a little bit of both. (63)
- Oftentimes the carrier bag would be box-shaped and jagged. These were the ones I liked the best, they were filled with books. The pages were already dog-eared and finger-printed, sometimes there were even crumbs. But I didn't mind. I though then that nothing could ever be absolutely new. The world was so big and so full of people I was certain that every material thing must be used and reused to its zenith; this was the only way it could make sense. (65)
- You sit quietly on the windowsill. In the potbellied armchair, I read. Sometimes you're up straight and looking away across the water, your thousand-mile stare. Sometimes you lie with your beard rested on your front paws, looking in, watching me. What are you thinking? I wish I could teach you how to read. I wish you could understand when I read to you. (68)
- And in this way, the years passed and passed and passed, just the old man and me and then just me and then you, and now us. (71)
- You shift your weight to lean against my shin. You're dry and warm and soft yet solid. I feel the bulge and fall of your ribcage as you sigh. You seem to do a lot of sighing. I find it strange because I always thought of a sigh as an expression of the sort of feeling which animals are not supposed to be capable of, and I wonder do you sigh because you have the smog inside you, my sapping smog. Does it build within your chest until your muscles spasm and push it out, away? (73)
- I'm afraid, I think more than anything, of losing you. (75)
- The tomato plants are sleeping outside now. perhaps they look a little hardened, fruitless but in flower. Against the stone fence in their sunless sun spot, the peas have yet to clasp their sticks and probably never will, not now. Their leaves are drab, their roots drowned dead in the gritty black scum of the bag. Why does everything either starve or drown? Always either too much or too little, always imbalance. (79)
- You never chase birds. I see how bewitched you are by furred things in the undergrowth and it always makes me wonder, why not birds? You'll squeeze your head down a rabbit hole, convinced your body can be contracted to follow. Yet you seem to know instinctively that you can't fly. (85)
- I'm particularly fond of sitting in the sun, of basking. It's a fondness which shows in the skin of my face, scorched over decades to a permanent tan, dappled by dubious freckles and shape-shifting blotches, no doubt the beginning of leisurely carcinomas. Still I cannot help myself. When I sit out to bask, I feel the sun suffusing my bloodstream and it's like the effects of a tobacco which cannot be pouched. I am instantly revived, inspired. (88)
- When I was about as tall as the letter slot and riding in the back of my father's car, we were passing through town one day, driving along the main street, and I remember seeing a woman through the window, standing in her doorway. After a moment, she turned and went back inside, closing the door behind her, and then of course I couldn't see her any more. I know it sounds like nothing much, but it was the first time I realised that other people's lives go on. All of the time, out of sight and without me. It was the first time I realised that everything just goes on and on and on. Regardless, relentless. (94)
- Before he retired, I knew very little of my father other than what I witnessed for myself. He spoke to me in a practical way, he never really told me things. I knew he always took a conference pear and a packet of custard creams to work. I knew he sat with his right ankle rested against the lid of his left knee. I knew he didn't like the taste of plastic from the new milk bottles. I knew a hundred mundane facts, but nothing of his longings, of his past. Now I wonder if he ate all of the custard creams himself or did he share them? And if he shared them, who did he share them with? (97)
- And now it's easiest of all with you. Now there's no need for the weighing and measuring of words, no need to listen to the way they stand in the air after my voice has finished. I tell you of the new rib tied to a rusted rung, the tower crane raised over refinery hill, the man who practises casting his lead off the pier at high tide. I tell you anything, as long as it staves the smog off, so long as it gags the sentence that shrills in my brain. I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE, it shrills, I KNOW, I KNOW. (111)
- To the left of my brain compendium, there are a few practical items: underpants and the camping cooker, kibble and gas, my father's slippers, a pebble jar, the low chair and the football, your precious food bowl. To the left, there is you. Of course there is you. Now you hop into my lap. And together, we rock. 'It's okay,' I tell you, 'it'll be okay.' (125)
- They are, all of them, middle-of-nowhere countries, left-behind countries, dead-end countries, no countries at all, really. They are sad places. Don't you think they're sad? But then I suppose this is how I always expected them to be. But then I suppose I always expect everything to be sad until proven otherwise. (140)
- I untie you, and as I do, I don't know why, but I feel euphoric. And you hop up and down in excitement, as though the cows were something we survived. You rush and skip into the beet again, as though you are euphoric too. (141)
- Now I glance at the side of my own face in the mirror's foreground, and I wonder have we grown to resemble one another, as we're supposed to. On the outside, we are still as black and gnarled as nature made us. But on the inside, I feel different somehow. I feel animalised. Now there's a wildness inside me that kicked off with you. (142)
- Now we circle a roundabout and circle again, and as we circle, I watch the traffic. I wonder where everyone is going. And I wonder if any of the road-kill creatures actually wanted to die and threw themselves beneath the speeding wheels. A lethargic swallow who couldn't bear the prospect of flying all the way back to Africa again. An insomniac hedgehog who couldn't stand the thought of lying awake all winter with no one to talk to. (144)
- Why didn't anyone stop for the jackdaw? Because the swan looks like a wedding dress, that's why. Whereas the jackdaw looks like a bin bag. Because this is how people measure life. (145)
- Sometimes I take liberties with the things I tell you. I know you understand this phrase means I'm leaving and not bringing you along, but every time I leave I guess you don't understand when I'll be back again, or if I will be back at all. You may be able to smell time, but you cannot tell it. (145)
- This morning, now freed, the stripped leaves skip and soar and shapeshift. They scuttle like pygmy shrews, flutter like common chaffinches. They spread across the road and contort into letters of the alphabet, miniature whirlwinds, religious apparitions. Did you see it? Did you see the Jesus face? They always look so much like something else from a distance, and up close, I'm always disappointed when they transfigure back into leaves, just leaves. (147)
- Now I'm snatching the air because it's supposed to be lucky to catch a falling leaf. I'm jumping, jumping, jumping and still I can't get any. But they're landing on my boulderish back and sticking to my greasy hair, and maybe this is lucky too. (147)
- It's the most absolute of autumns. But soon, slow, autumn will lose its radiance. Autumn will be threshed and chopped and spun back to brown and bole and dun. (148)
- I realise that you were not born with a predetermined capacity for wonder, as I'd believed. I realise that you fed it up yourself from tiny pieces of the world. I realise it's up to me to follow your example and nurture my own wonder, morsel by morsel by morsel. (148)
- Do you remember the traffic cone buried in the bay? When the tide went out, it poked up as far as its third band. Then when the tide came in, it was again submerged and I'd forget that it was there at all. Still buried, just out of sight. I'd again forget that things continue to exist even though I cannot see them. (151)
- From where I'm sitting, I can see through the restaurant's glass front to where our car is parked. I can see the silhouette of your head and ears and neck, your crushed velveteen paws resting against the dashboard, the glint of the tag on your collar, the glint of your maggot nose and the glint of your lonely peephole. Out the restaurant's glass front and through the car windscreen, I can see all of my family at once, glinting all over. /// And suddenly you seem so small and faraway, and I realise we haven't been separated for more than a few moments in weeks and weeks. (153)
- I lie awake and smell your malodorous snores slowly filling the air, and I wonder can you smell me as strongly. My smoky, yeasty, heinous breath. And I wonder which organ is putrefying inside em and how it generates so sickening a stench. ... It's like all my bad habits are fermenting in an infernal pit below my mouth hole, rising up to taunt me when I'm fresh from sleep and at my most defenceless. ... Is this what my father's house smelled like? Not garlic and coffee and cigarette smoke and bins, not the old feet sweat in his slippers, not the draught through the keyhole and cracks in the ceiling plaster, but like my heinous breath instead? (157)
- And now I address it all to you. You who never spoke anyway. You who misunderstands almost everything. I describe the things we pass even though nothing is interesting, even though I've already mentioned it several times over, even though I know now I sound like the imbecile. (159)
- This is the way people survive, by filling one hole at a time for the flightiest of temporary gratifications, over and over and over, until the season's out and they die off anyway, wither back into the wall or path, into their dark crevasse. This is the way life's eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself. (160)
- I miss my father's house. I miss it more the further we go and the less I know where we are going. Everything I remember is caught in the void between its stained carpets and slanted slates. All my memories are caste to a honeyed hue by its yellow walls. (162)
- It's only now you're gone I see how you're my reason for doing things. Now I'm a stiltwalker with the stilts removed. My emptied trouser legs flap in the wind and I can't remember how to walk without being precipitously propped. (165)
- But it took me fifty-seven years to become this me, I think, and I just don't have the stamina to make so many mistakes all over again. (172)
- I see the mud already dried into your fur and the threads of grey worming through your curls in the place where I wiped your face clean. And I wonder are you old? I'd forgotten that you might be old. (181)
- Your right eye is closed and on the other side, your eye-hollow is close too, so that, in sleep, you look almost symmetrical again. You seem almost unscathed. (182)
- Why did I tell her we were on our way home? I wonder if it's because I now I want it to be true. (186)
- I've completely forgotten what my bare legs look like and my clobbered jaw hurts with every ounce of consciousness, with the united intensity of every fall I never felt in boyhood. (189)
- There's an extremely fine strand of your fur lodged in the wound, and I wonder how I wounded it and what force of nature carried this particular strand to my finger and deposited it there. Now I tug the free end, but the strand resists. And I see that I'm too late, that it's already set into a scab, that it's part of me now, that you're part of me. (201)
- There aren't any other cars passing on the road and over the hedge, perhaps the winter wheat is rustling softly to itself and perhaps the birds are singing, but I can't hear anything but you, your implacable warning call. (202)
- I should be acclimatised after so many winters in my father's house, still everything aches and I don't know whether it's the cold or the position I'm trying to sleep in or both, probably both. (204)
- I think I could travel as far as Tasmania and still I'd stop in the first little shop I stumbled upon and try to buy gingernuts, margarine, fish fingers, spaghetti hoops. Then I think I'd find a salmon pink house in a place by the coast where the shore birds wade, and I'd go about every day in exactly the same way I've always done, and the only thing different would be that we'd be in Tasmania. Yes, you could come, of course you could come. How could I ever manage without you now? (205)
- ...Every house and every family, however scrupulously clean, has its own smell. Of course I know you know this already, that every smell is ten times bigger to your senses, that you can smell history, that you can smell time. My father's house smelled of black mould, cigarette smoke, fried garlic, hand-wash, damp dust, swaety slippers, my own heinous breath and the fetid draught through the cracks in the ceiling plaster, the keyhole of the shut-up-and-locked room; but they consolidated into what was simply the smell of home, which no one word can describe and nowhere in Tasmania can smell exactly like. (206)
- Sometimes I notice tiny scars beneath your coat, tiny claw slashes and teeth prints. A few bits of your ears are missing, a few bits of your face. Can you remember how you lost them? Do you dream about it, as I do? I see how you move your left brow up and down and left and right in coordination with the expression on your face. I notice how still you blink your eye hollow. Do you miss your missing eye, I wonder. Have you even realised it's gone? (208-9)
- You gobble the bread and lick your chops, and the girl laughs, sincerely. Just for a second, I feel like a regular person, doing regular things, in a regular way. I look around at the crowd, at the peddlers peddling and browsers browsing, at mums rallying three-wheel buggies and teenagers slouching against each other and old folk baby-stepping behind their walking frames. And I feel faintly ordinary, faintly inconspicuous, faintly unsuspicious. And it's good, so good. (212)
- Sitting locked inside our quiet capsule, I try to picture the details of these people's lives, in order that they'll seem less unfamiliar, less unsettling. I try to picture the colour of their walls, the clutter on their kitchen tables, the view out their front-facing windows. But no matter how hard I try, all I can see is my purest egg-yolk yellow, my inkless biros, the mud of my bay. (215)
- And we drive out of the seaside town and away from the main road, away again in search of a reassuring dead end where the drowned view is ours alone. You understand. I know you understand. (215)
- Who lives here, I wonder. Who would you guess lives here? ... An old woman, I think. An old woman too frail to hoick a lawnmower across the grass or lift a power-hose to her limpets. She has a paunchy son, I think, of thereabout my age, who keeps promising he'll come and do a job on the garden, but never does. I would willingly hoick and mow and hose for this old woman. I'd chop off my plait to have an old woman of my own who'd let me sit at her kitchen table with a steaming cup and a gingernut. Maybe she'd let you sniff the overgrown garden, to excavate her flowerbeds for buried pats of shit. But it's too late, I'm sorry. Now I have no idea how things begin, nor how to know that they are safe, nor how to show strangers we are safe too. (216-217)
- And we stay like this until the sea has risen to the tip of the dark stain on the cliff-rock which marks the line of highest tide. And I note the time. I memorise it. Now I'll never let myself lose track again. (220)
- Now I grow as rapt by the spinnerman's task as the spinnerman, as intent upon a catch. We watch his slow-yet-certain progress across the distant rocks, how artfully he flicks the rod, dips and swishes his jellied lure. Now I begin to feel what he feels, a vestige of the force that compels him to fish even though it's cold and dangerous and disappointing. Across the wet weed I am whispering, Just once more, Just a little closer, this time, almost. (221)
- I never expected it would take so much reversing to make a straight line. (223)
- From the radio, an expert is telling us how birds will gather loose hair and use it to cushion the lining of their nests. But now I remember, of course, it isn't spring. It's December. I'm months and months and months too early, too late. (224)
- ...I wasn't paralysed by fear or stunned into spontaneous memory loss. Nothing like that. I didn't do anything because I simply decided not to. (226)
- And I want to collect the swallow's nest from its roof cranny because maybe if I have their nest then the swallows will somehow still know how to find me. (229)
- And for a while I didn't hear the scratching in the roof any more, or I forgot to listen. (237)
- ...to dismiss the uneasy silence he'll say things about the weather, about the cold, and I'll reply Sure you never know from one minute to the next what's coming even though it isn't true, I did know. For fifty-seven years I knew. And it's only now that I don't. It's only since you. (251)
- On calm nights, I sleep so deep I crush my hands and wrists inside some larger cleft of my body and wake to find them bloodless, numb. It makes me afraid the night will come when I crush you instead. (253-4)
- Are you spooked because there's something spooky out there or are you feeding off my own incompressible uneasiness, my stupid fears? I cannot tell. (257)
- The seas are high tonight, higher than all the nights passed since we arrived, so it seems. Now the clear sky's choking up with rain clouds. They take the moon out, now begin to shed. See how the drops are dense and drowsy, as close as rain can come to snow. It's half past two exactly, and still I cannot sleep. See there behind the shedding rain clouds, there are moon oceans and moon mountains and lakes full of moon water. Remember? Or is there even water on the moon? I'm not so sure any more. (258)
- I watch as the ice melts into drinking water, and I wonder why, why I'm trying so hard to keep going. (259)
- The current is taking my father, drawing him away to the place where the shorebirds disappear at nighttime and high tide, to the great floating continent called Out To Sea. (264)
- Now we've retrieved the irretrievable days, and can begin again. (264)
- I know I should be looking at the road, but it's okay, the car won't let us swerve off course. It knows the way. (267)
- I hadn't known that a life could be ended so effortlessly, so ingloriously. (269)
- It's a sad place, but then I seem to find most places sad, and maybe it's me who's sad and not the places after all. Maybe there's nowhere I can go, and no point in going. (270)
- ...you don't belong to me, One Eye. You don't belong to me and I was wrong to ever treat you like you do. You belong to the inveigling hills, to the fields and ditches untrammelled, to the holes in the forest, the horizon line, the badgers. The seasons don't belong to me and the sea doesn't belong to me and the sky doesn't belong to me. All I own is my father's house, the saddest place in our whole small world. ... even if I did change, I'd only change back again. (271)
- There's a free bird of fear inside my chest but beneath its wings my organs are putrefying, bit by bit by bit. (271)
- I'm listing every last thing as though you can't see at all, as though I am the eye you lost. (271)
nov 10 2021 ∞
jan 4 2022 +