“Child Silhouette” by Norbert Eder, CC BY 2.0
Harry sat in the ute, window down, and watched from across the road. Kids running wild – wound up and let loose. The bell, petering sounds, then quiet. He read the newspaper and waited. Drank coffee from a thermos and ate mandarins, used torn-up peel to make a collage on the passenger seat and rubbed the stickiness from his fingers onto the sheepskin steering-wheel cover.
At recess, kids rushed into the playground like a freak wave. A pack played dinosaur games, shrieked around the prefab wooden fort by the fence. The boy ran to the top, tyrannosaurus elbows tucked tight to his body. He opened his mouth and roared.
Harry had taken the early ferry, got off at Kettering and driven north. He’d parked outside the kindergarten in North Hobart and watched Caitlin leave. Seen the curve of her mouth as she waved goodbye to the boy. He’d been watching the boy for weeks, trying to work up the courage, but every time he moved his hand towards the door handle his heart flipped in his chest and he lost his nerve.
*
Back on Bruny Island, Harry looked across the haze of stubbled grass that tumbled down to the casuarina-fringed coast and tried to picture the boy in the grey wooden shed he’d turned into a home: limbs folded in the awkward angles of children, nestled into the couch that was still covered in the saris Caitlin had bought in India.
When he’d met Caitlin she’d been the only other person in the tiny, shabby cinema at McLeod Ganj. She was wearing Thai fisherman’s pants and her hair was in dreadlocks. The smell of her patchouli almost masked the stench of body odour trapped in the grimy cinema seats. The movie had been a Bollywood offering, and a number of times they’d caught themselves laughing and groaning at the same places. The film was less than halfway through when Caitlin tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he wanted to get out of there.
The rooftop terrace cafe of the Ladies’ Hotel was perched between the road and the steep tilt into what was almost a ravine. Harry and Caitlin sat opposite one another on bench chairs. She ordered them banana pancakes and chai.
When she got up to go to the toilet, he watched her walk away then turned to look down the valley. The land dipped and flattened into a clearing where the concrete Tsuglagkhang compound of the Dalai Lama sat.
Caitlin returned and sat next to him, followed his gaze and told him she’d been waiting for six months for the Dalai Lama to be in residence.
‘I think you’re a sign,’ she said, and she squeezed Harry’s knee beneath the table.
*
Harry went inside and sat on his bed, pulled out his battered tin and rested the lid on the windowsill and rolled himself a joint – filled and tucked, licked and tightened. He should fix the gap in the window frame; the evening wind had begun to whistle through as it flew up from the coast. It reminded him of the annoying noise Caitlin made when she slept.
He wanted to light the joint, but images of the boy and the sound of his voice filled Harry’s mind. He tried to roll a box of matches around in his palm the way he used to roll the Chinese chime balls Caitlin had given him while they were still in India. He wondered where those balls had gone, whether she’d taken them with her when she took all of the things she’d wanted, when she took the boy. He felt the newly familiar flare of anger in his throat, tried to swallow it.
He felt the newly familiar flare of anger in his throat, tried to swallow it.
Outside, Harry stuck the thin, papered cylinder of the joint between his lips. Against his skin it felt like the right kind of substantial, seemed to connect him to the earth, and he imagined the papers as trees before they changed shape and became something else.
He shook his head. Caitlin was right; he was always too far up his own arse. He wouldn’t have made any kind of father. A memory snagged then – Caitlin sneering across the kitchen table, laughing at his feeble attempts to philosophise – and he felt the anger reignite, felt bile rise in his throat.
He lit the joint, savoured the taste. He’d never liked the smell of it much, only the flavour. Caitlin said that was dumb, said the two things were almost the same, so entwined as to be only the one thing, really. Caitlin was like that. She thought she had the measure of everything, of everyone, and for a time after she’d left, without her as yardstick, Harry hadn’t been sure of his margins. But he’d seen the boy now.
*
When Caitlin left, the boy had only been a tiny bump, and she had given every sign of being furious, repulsed. She’d refused to discuss what they should do, so Harry had been sure she hadn’t wanted the child. Could remember nothing to suggest she had. He began to suspect he was meant to have begged her, to prove that it mattered, that they mattered.
The letter about the boy had come from some government department. Harry’s name was on the birth certificate, and they wanted to know about money. But he didn’t have any. He’d had to send copies of bank statements. They never sent him any proof the boy was his, though he figured it must be right. He’d taken a beer from the fridge and sat at the table outside with the letter in his hand, and rubbed his forehead until it stung. He’d imagined Caitlin – her round, taut stomach rippling from the movement beneath. He’d thought of their last days together – how he’d somehow got used to the sharpness of her judgement and it had seemed accurate and fair. He hadn’t amounted to much; he didn’t finish anything. She’d told him that until he believed it. Then, not long before she left, she’d said, ‘You’re not the sign I’m looking for.’
Harry got stoned a lot, cleared some of the larger eucalypts from the property so that he could see the coast. It took months before he began to breathe more easily, trust himself to make the simple decisions that Caitlin had taken control of.
When the shock of the letter dissipated, Harry was washed in anger. He looked up Caitlin in the phone book, circled the local kindergartens with deep-blue pen marks in the street directory. Remembered her last words: ‘You are a stranger to me now.’ He realised she had always wiped the slate clean. She never talked of her past and he had never met her family or friends. He’d assumed that she had wanted him for herself, but now he could see that she only moved forward. He considered what this might mean for the boy, whether it was healthy.
The first time he saw the boy – hand invisible inside Caitlin’s, an orange Winnie-the-Pooh backpack slung over his shoulder – his small face was turned up towards hers. Harry smiled, felt a visceral pull towards this unknown creature, an unbidden searing rage towards Caitlin.
The boy’s features were neat, unlike his or Caitlin’s, as though the boy had conjured the idea of the perfect child and drawn himself. Harry wondered briefly whether it galled Caitlin that the boy didn’t look like her. But Caitlin wasn’t like that; she didn’t believe in regret, was surely incapable of it.
*
The day before the custody application, Harry got out of the car, walked past the kindergarten fence, stopped when the boy ran over to retrieve a ball. He was about to speak when a teacher called the children inside.
Before recess, a police car parked behind his ute.
‘He’s my son.’ The words felt like stones tumbling out of his mouth. Even he didn’t believe them.
‘Is that right?’ The officer took his hat off.
Harry started the engine. ‘It’s alright. I won’t come again.’ He turned the handle and wound his window closed.
‘He’s my son.’ The words felt like stones tumbling out of his mouth. Even he didn’t believe them.
The officer looked at him, raised his hand to knock on the glass, then withdrew and slowly walked back to the footpath. The officer was still visible in his rear-view mirror as Harry rounded the corner and headed back to the ferry.
Tomorrow, he’d take the early ferry again. The lawyer would meet him at the courthouse. He wouldn’t be able to smoke a joint to calm his nerves. He didn’t like the thought of it, but the lawyer had said if he wanted visitation rights he’d need to be squeaky- clean – as though Caitlin was squeaky-clean, as though she’d ever been.The boy had probably been stoned on second-hand smoke every day of his life.
Harry stopped at Kingston, bought cereal and tinned food from the supermarket, lingered in the toy aisle, ran his hands over packets of bright plastic things and tried to imagine how any of it could be necessary. He felt a compulsion to fill his trolley with the kinds of disposable junk he hated.
At the department store he bought a mattress and doona, chose sheets with trains over the ones with bears, and loaded the mattress into the back of the ute.
In the corner of the storage shed that was his workshop, he rubbed sandpaper over the turned legs one more time and wiped them down before pouring oil on a soft, blue cloth and running it the length of each leg and then all along the frames. He let it dry for a few hours then carried the small bed into the house and set it down by the wood heater.
*
Caitlin didn’t turn up. Her lawyer asked for an adjournment and the judge let him have it.
Back at the office in South Hobart, Harry’s lawyer took him out to the terrace of the old sandstone building, said Caitlin not showing up didn’t mean anything, then went on about the beehives that lined the rear fence of the property, as if Harry, being from the island and all, ought to give a shit.
‘I’m not going to lie to you, Harry. It’s not going to be easy.’
Harry nodded, an image of the boy in his head. ‘The boy’s got my brother’s ears. You could pick him up and swing him around by them.’
The lawyer cleared his throat, scraped his shoe against the pavers.
‘Not that I would. Obviously.’
*
Next time, they waited in a corridor lit by fluorescent tubes. Harry felt self-conscious, his new jeans dark and stiff. Shirt with creases from the packet. Beard trimmed neatly, hair pulled into a ponytail at the base of his neck. Caitlin could arrive at any time. She might be in the car park or drinking coffee in a cafe down at Salamanca.
‘Don’t worry, mate. Just smile, be polite. That’s all you need to do.’
Harry tried to relax his brow, let his face fall slack, but the nerves were roiling, making his face tight, his limbs twitchy and alien.
He told the lawyer he needed the toilet. Walked straight out the main doors. Caitlin was walking up the courthouse steps as Harry turned the key in the ignition.
He drove onto the ferry, yanked on the handbrake and got out to lean over the rail. Curved peaks of water plinked at the steel sides of the ferry. He yanked free his ponytail and let the wind wrap his hair around his face. Watched through strands as the Kettering cove disappeared and Bruny Island became larger.
At his outdoor table, he drank beer from a long neck and smoked a joint, completed the dot-to-dot of his property, eucalypt by eucalypt, finished up at the line of casuarinas. He left his jeans on the table and fell asleep on the train-covered sheets, feet resting against a turned blackwood leg. Woke in the night to the sound of the wind, the roar of a tyrannosaurus.
This story is an extract from Melissa Manning’s Smokehouse, published this month by UQP. Smokehouse is available now at your local independent bookseller.
