Young Writers Society

Bill is crossing the lawn before she has eventurned the car off.It’s as though he’s been standing by the kitchen window with the John Deere umbrella, watching the road through the rain. Under the umbrella, he hugs her with one arm. “Welcome home, Don,” he says standing on his toes to lay a Dad kiss. He has a big gas lamp grin.

“I’ll grab the bags, you get inside by the fire.”

“Oh, Darling it’s been far too long,” Sue says coming forward with her arms set at twelve-fifteen. She’s more wrinkled, her eyes squarer somehow. “Mmm it’s so good to have you home.” Donna watches the fire over Sue’s shoulder as it gnaws dry wedges of pine. When the embrace ends, Sue steps back rubbing Donna’s upper arms, her smile is a nose wrinkle.

* * * * *

After dinner, Sue wants to ask her questions, pour herself endless cups of tea while Bill sits close by hunched over his knees listening. Sue is thin in the face, but her flannelette gown stretches around her hips. I’ve got her bones, that’s for sure, Donna thinks. As they talk, Sue moves closer touching Donna softly on her forearm, her long fingers pressed into the sleeve of Donna’s blouse as if to steady her hand.

“You look well, Mom.”

“Ha, Do I? I can’t say I feel well, but I’m walking with Margot from up the road. Every day at four. They say walking is supposed to help.”

The flight has drained Donna, she yawns an octave, apologises, she has just hit the wall.

In her bedroom, she swallows her contraceptive and rolls a tiny blue pill between thumb and forefinger, then drops it in the open makeup bag on the floor. She gropes through her luggage yielding only a rosary of tangled lace underwear. Chris will be worried sick. There’s a couple of books in the bedside table, The Golden Compass, dog eared and heavy, and one of the Harry Potter series. Flicking through a few pages takes her mind off things. Outside, the storm climbs to a crescendo, the wind presses the windowpanes.

When she wakes, the curtain is framed in a pale glow. Her phone, like a phantom limb, is not there when she reaches for it. It would be early in Melbourne anyway. Chris might be up. He’d be pumping out a set of press ups or he’d have the television up too loud so he can listen to the morning show in the shower. The day she left, when the dawn sky bled through the blinds the colour of milky tea, he climbed on top of her, barely waking her. Focused on the pillow behind her head, he began to rock. There had been a time when he looked at her body, at the very least his own, but now he gazed only at the pillow.

She opens the door. Sue is standing there, her eyes widen. “Oh, sorry dear, I was just listening if you were awake yet.” Donna is palming her heart.

“It’s fine,” she says. “I’m heading for a shower.”

“Of course. You remember where the towels are, don’t you?”

In the bathroom, the heat bulb is frosted from the inside with dead bugs, the avocado green vanity is chipped, and the shower dribbles despite the hum of pent up water.

Something unfurls in the deepest part of her, a snake coming to life. She lets her pyjama bottoms fall and watches the spectre in the fogged mirror. It’s the battery making her anxious. It’s a real condition, she read about it online once. Technology induced anxiety. T.I.A. Technology-absence anxiety disorder. T.A.A.D. They’ll have an acronym for it. Maybe it’s this town. She tests the water with her hand, steps into it and picks up the soap. Holding it to her nose.She always hated the smell, ever since Bill had ground a bar against her teeth for saying the word cunt.

Clean and dressed, she sits on her bed studying the yard. Sue is whipping a shirt, pegging it up on the iron Hills-Hoist clothesline, which leans like a cocktail umbrella. Sue coughs, bending a little, her head whiplashed by the force of it. The overgrown lemon tree, still too flimsy to climb, is burdened with fruit. Birthdays in that yard. Sue carrying a tray of cheerio’s spared on tooth picks. Scraps of pass-the-parcel. The hide and seek countdown beginning and the other kids flying away like fallen leaves. Ready or not… Beyond the tree, stands Piker’s old kennel. She rushes to the lounge.

“Morning love,” Bill says, glancing up from the Newspaper. “How’d you sleep?”

“Good thanks.” Looking out the kitchen window she says, “Where’s Piker?”

“Piker?” Bill shrugs his grey eyebrows.

Sue comes in. “I could swear something’s been getting at the lemon tree again,” she says, holding the washing basket against her hip to close the door.

“Donna’s asking about Piker.”

“Piker?” she says. “I mentioned it in an email, remember?” Sue could still be a teacher, with her bird of prey eyes, the way she stands holding her cheek, her forearms shaped in an ‘L’.

“What?”

“He ran away,” Sue says.

Donna swallows. “Ran away?”

“One day I got home and the side gate was open. We thought he’d come home, but he didn’t.”

“When?”

“Jeez, when was it?” She looks to her husband, sitting at the kitchen bench. “A year, maybe more.”

“Did someone leave the gate open?”

“I don’t know, Darling. It doesn’t matter.”

“She was getting old,” Bill adds. “We let her in in winter and she pissed on the new carpet.”

She was no longer listening.

“Oh, darling, Piker was really getting on,” Sue begins, moving closer to palm Donna’s back. “She’s probably been taken in by another family.” Nobody speaks for a moment then, “Do you want a tea or something? Or maybe I can start breakfast now if you like?”

“I don’t like tea.” A bee plucking at a flower in the garden holds her attention.

“Well, would you like a coffee?”

“Yeah, a coffee would be good.”

“I’ll see if we have any.”

Sue pulls out a container of black teas taking them out one at a time.

“Nope, nothing. I’ll head down the store and grab you some, dear.”

“It’s fine.”

“I’ll go,” her dad says. “You want to come for a ride, Sweetheart?”

There’s a foot of sheepskin wrapped around the seatbelts, for what purpose Donna can’t even imagine. But it’s there, itching her neck, and it has been there for as long as she can remember. It’s only now that she notices it. She looks at Bill. Work has kept him lean, tanned, leathered.

“She thinks she’s getting better.”

Donna looks at him. “Is she?”

He shows her the underside of his bottom lip, then says, “It means the world you coming back, you know.”

When they pull up, she says, “Mind if I stay in the car?”

“I’ll leave the radio on.” He puts the key back in the ignition. Soon, Bill wanders back swinging a bag of groceries. He opens the door and drops into his seat.

“It’s actually turned out to be a nice day.” He drags the seatbelt across his chest fiddling to get the clip in.

Bacon hisses filling the kitchen and the lounge with an aroma that reminds her of this house. Can someone be reminded of a place they are in? The house hasn’t changed. The scent reminds her, not of the house, but of the people that once occupied it. The people haven’t changed, they are different people all together.

Did they build the house or buy?

Different people.

“Don’t frown, darling, you will end up with wrinkles like me.”

“I already have wrinkles.”

Sue is stirring a cup of instant coffee. She sets it in front of Donna on a coaster. “You, Miss, have perfect skin.” The coffee tastes like someone’s dipped a mug in a flooded drain.

“Now tell me about your new job?”

“It’s not new, Mom. I’ve told you about it before.”

“It’s still new to us.” A vibration in her voice, the wrong note rising through an orchestra. Bill clears his throat into the back of his hand then spears a couple of layers of bacon.

“I work in an office. I answer phones and send emails.”

“There must be more to it than that?”

“Not really.” She pokes her bottom lip out. The loose skin of Sue’s neck swings as she swallows. Her eyes sharpen. Donna wants to lean on her mother’s shoulder. Wishing she could make it natural, how she would have leaned on Sue’s shoulder as a kid. Mouth agape, throw her head back at a knock-knock joke. Sue’s eyes would be as wet and still as Lake Tikitapu. When she goes to speak, she can’t force the air over her vocal chords.

“A jobs a job I s’pose. What about your house, tell me about your house?”

She swallows. “I live in an apartment with a guy called Chris who is my boyfriend.” Bill’s watching his wife’s face.

“Aha Chris”—taut smile—“We have a name finally.”

“Stop it, Mom.”

“So tell us more about Chris?”

“Like what?”

“Oh I don’t know—” her fingers dance in the air “—what does he do?”

“He works in sales.”

“Really? What sort of sales?”

She pokes at her hair with her fingers. “He works in my office. He sells accounting software.”

“I can’t wait to meet him.” Her mom’s smile lingers like an afterthought. “We could always visit Melbourne?” she says turning to Bill.

He has this way of sitting after he has eaten, with his arms over the back of his chair like a man shot in the chest in an old western. “Could we?”

Donna’s heart gives a little leap. She can see her mom’s thoughts in her face her. Something unsaid fills the silences like rising water. She stands to take her dishes to the sink. Sue shoos her away. “I’ll take those.” The plate clatters on the table, Donna walks away.

The bathroom tiles are damp, crudely so and warm like human flesh. She smears the tacky yellow soap between her fingertips. Sues voice hushes, quickens when Donna closes the bathroom door, then she falls silent. “Do you mind if I call Chris? I’ll pay the charges. My mobile’s flat—”

“—Don’t be silly,” her father says, heaving up from his recliner to fetch the phone. “That’s the problem with these Me-Machines everyone’s got. Unreliable.”

She hasn’t used the cordless since she was a teenager, clutching the cold plastic to her face, talking to Tony Mathews, whispering things she had never got out at school.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“My God, Donna. What the hell is going on?”

“My phones dead.”

“It’s dead?” Long sigh. “I’ve been worried. I had to check that the flight had landed. God.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

“You need to think. You just don’t think.”

“I said I’m sorry, God.”

“So what’s kept you so busy that you couldn’t email or text?”

“Nothing.”

“Hmn”

“I didn’t know it would be a big deal.” She holds her breath to hear him better. “Please don’t be mad at me. I can’t deal with you being mad at me right now.”

“Sorry.” There’s a pause. “It’s just you really picked the worst time to shoot off.”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry, okay?”

• * * * * *
• It’s possible they were sparing her the truth when they had told her Piker had run away. Maybe Piker was sleeping on the driveway when Bill backed the Ford out of the garage and squeezed her insides out. She had run away as a puppy. A man in cyclist’s tights, with a bike strapped to the back of his Volvo carried her to the front door. I found her in the redwoods, he had said, transferring Piker to the cradle of Sue’s arms. How she crossed the Highway is beyond me.

That afternoon, Donna steps out into the backyard. The dew, in the shadow of the house, soaks through her socks in patches. She tries to find the unmarked spot where five puppies are buried. By now they’d be tiny yellowed bones—the smoke had unthreaded from the corners of the box the microwave came in; Bill leaned out the window of the Ford, the engine growling, doesn’t hurt them, see. At the back of the block there is a Pohutukawa. It’s filled with flowers like a cloud of crimson smoke wafting through the leaves. It’s always been there, growing slowly. There’s a good sitting spot forking out from the trunk. …Here I come. Taking a branch to pull herself up, she finds it’s grown, she can’t grip it. Letting go, her hand falls to her chest like she’s holding something precious. Soon her hands will be like her mothers, a bird’s-nest of bones and veins and papery skin.

The following morning, there’s a tap at the door. “You awake?”

“Kinda.”

“We’re heading down to the craft market and were wondering if you wanted to come along?”

“What time?”

“Soonish.”

“I need a shower.”

“Take your time. You want a cup of tea?”

“Coffee would be good.”

“Coffee, that’s right.”

She holds herself against the tiles beneath the shower head. The water pulls her hair into an eel, sucking the base of her skull. After some time, she straightens, puts her hands under her breasts then runs them down the flank of pallid skin, flattening the faint dimples. Her body has changed in the years since she left. Shadows change in new light. The water runs between her fingers as blood runs from a wound. She takes up the bar of soap and begins to smear it on her hands, beneath her arms, down the insides of her legs.

* * * * *

Outside of the plane, the clouds are mother of pearl. Sue had said good bye before heading off on her walk. She’d spoken as if Donna was going to work, or to the pub. Bill hugged her so long she shuddered. “Shit, we miss you, Don. Make sure you call us when you get in.” The plane engine drones. He had smeared his hand down his face and sniffed, then he rubbed her arms. His hands were hard as grout. “Look at me.” He laughed a solitary huh from the base of his throat. She wanted words, something nice. Something from her to him: a thick edge of steak he could chew over as his back aches at work, or when the ads are on the tele. The cackle of a baby winds up at the back of the plane.

Why would a dog just up and run away like that?