Tarcutta Wake (3 page)

In the mornings we would sometimes hear him singing

In the mornings we would sometimes hear him singing. His voice came strong across the greying, toothless fence, across the famous nine-foot tomato plants and the green outdoor table covered in empty bottles and cigarette ash. It got in through broken sash windows held up by encyclopaedias and cask-wine boxes, and it found all of us there, sharing the one large roof but watching the paint flake from different ceilings.

Inside we were standing at our kitchen sinks and our bathroom sinks; we were reading at desks, and at the tables that functioned as desks; we were sitting on unmade beds coaxing music from battered instruments; we were yelling at the newspaper, our hands still sticky with wallpaper glue and our mouths still sticky with sleep; we were falling in love with Rothko, finding beautiful ways to talk about violence; we were ravenous and restless; we were so still we collected dust.

When we heard him singing we would pause with our toothbrushes in our mouths, our hands in the grey dishwater. We forgot our hunger, lifted our faces from the works of Cisneros and Stein, let the instruments sleep in our arms. We would lower our fists, we would listen.

All of us were in between, rising or falling; we wouldn't know which way till afterwards. There was so much to look forward to. There was so much to be sorry about. For that time we lived in the midst of each other's static, the murmurings of radios and televisions that came through walls, muffled conversations that rose from the floor or floated down through the ceiling. There were no true secrets. In place of secrets we kept contraband animals, a menagerie of cats and small dogs. When one of them became sick and died we buried it at the back of the block, under the tree that sheltered the red leather lounge suite somebody had dragged out there two Januarys before. In the height of summer we drank tequila and cycled to the beach to watch the waves toss jellyfish up onto the sand. We slept under wet towels, or we slathered our skins in Aerogard and stretched out on old sheets in the Alister Clark Memorial Rose Gardens, listening to the arguments Blessington Street staged with itself in the dead heat of the early hours.

In winter we watched our breath cloud the air above our beds. We bought firewood from the bent man near the railway bridge, his tattered woollen cardigan with splinters and sawdust caught in the weave. We lit fires under blocked chimneys and all our clothes smelled of smoke. Grown men fell asleep on our doorsteps, curled up like children, and we stepped around them to unlock our doors, saying
just this once
while riding high on the shoulders of our own benevolence. Working girls redid their make-up in the yellow light of our stairwells, in the brief interludes between blown or stolen bulbs. Our bicycles disappeared from the railing we chained them to and an anonymous hand scrawled
One day soon I will be waiting inside for you
above the door of No. 8.

But in the mornings we would sometimes hear him singing, and his voice thrummed through all the busted hot water systems and dirty sheets and disconnection notices, through the discarded needles and the places where our bicycles used to be. His voice touched these things the way a small child touches the fur of an unfamiliar dog, not conceiving of the possibility of being bitten. His voice made these things better than they were, lifting them above the seedy and the broken and the dangerous so that they became something else; a bronze cast of something seedy and broken, a collodion photograph of something broken and dangerous. He did this without knowing it, and although we could not understand the language he sang in, we understood what it meant to keep your voice – if only your voice – and to use it whenever you could in an ugly apartment where you went for weeks without anyone saying your name. Where basil and coriander struggled from plastic pots along the kitchen window sill, growing in the three-hour blade of sunlight that cut between the two buildings like they were two halves of a failed cake.

Some days we saw him in the fresh produce section of the supermarket, and did not understand how such a voice came from such a man. We would feign distraction, turning away from his rum-blossomed face in our sudden desperation for artichokes, for tamarillos. Or we would exchange awkward pleasantries while he selected ripe apricots from the display and broke them open with his knotty hands. He would bite into one half of the fruit, then spit it right back out onto the green linoleum floor. Pah, he said. No good. Taste of nothing, you see. Then he would offer the other half to us for confirmation. Nothing at all, we would agree, awed by his disregard for supermarket conduct.

When the development notices arrived, addressed to The Occupant instead of to our names, some of us had already cottoned on, spooked by men with retractable tapes measuring the low brick wall that housed our letterboxes, and which the working girls would sit along in a fleshy row, like birds or cats or cabs, when business was bad and their feet had started to ache. Some of us had already started packing. Some of us knew the signs.

We are gone now, all of us. And the corner stores are clothing stores, and the arts supply is closed. The pubs where we shot pool and slouch-danced to Red Right Hand on the jukebox, those pubs do not have pool tables or jukeboxes anymore.

In the mornings I get up, I make coffee, the cat asks to be fed. I share no walls, no roof, no backyard. I can go naked into the backyard if I want to, and I do sometimes, to remind myself I can. The only radio I hear is my own, reiterating the small issues in the hope they will distract from the real issues. And yes, people still sing – there will always be singing – but it's never the kind that makes something better than it is. My disconnection notices are just disconnection notices. My dirty sheets, they're just that.

The taxidermist's wife

The Museum of Taxidermy was nothing like the natural history section of the State Museum. The bear at the
mot
had a shiny coat and its glass eyes looked like real bear eyes. The fur was not coming off the viscacha in tufts, all the zebra's stripes matched up and you couldn't see the lions' seams. None of the animals were in glass cabinets; none of them had hundred-year-old paper tags with serial numbers and Latin names in spidery handwriting.

The
mot
had been built as a theatre in the twenties. The stage was still there, with its red velvet curtains pulled aside. Some of the animals stood on the stage awkwardly, as if in the middle of a dress rehearsal where everyone had forgotten their lines. The animals that were not on the stage – the audience animals – were waiting patiently for the actor animals to remember.

The taxidermist lived with his wife in a small house behind the theatre-museum. They'd set up a lounge room in what had once been a dressing room. The wife was in there most days, sitting on the worn-out leather couch and watching daytime television or reading southern gothic novels, while the taxidermist took care of the business and made sure that visitors paid the two dollar entry.

It was the taxidermist's wife who fascinated us more than anything, more than the stiff animals or the display of taxidermy tools that looked like instruments of meticulous torture. The taxidermist's wife, who was in love with a man devoted to preserving the dead. For a time we liked to speculate about who her former lovers might be – the Latin professor, the obituarist, the forensics photographer. But the taxidermist's wife walked right through the walls of the ideas we had for her, back to the faded couch and Carson McCullers.

She knew almost nothing about the taxidermy process, and could not answer any of our questions, redirecting us to her husband when we asked about ear pliers or polyurethane forms.

But she understood the gentleness of such work. She knew a thing or two about responsibility. If we came in early on a Thursday, we'd find her kneeling in front of the pet cabinet with a small white box open on her lap. The pet cabinet was a cupboard stacked with dozens of small white boxes, and in each was the preserved skin of a cat or a small dog, or in one case, a large coffee-coloured rabbit.

Nobody was coming back for any of them. Loving owners had grieved for them years ago when they died of old age or snail pellets or traffic, and they were brought to the taxidermist wrapped in towels or soft cloth. But these animals were to remain eyeless, jawless, shapeless, marking the point where that grief was no longer a thousand-dollar grief or a twelve-hundred-and fifty-dollar grief.

Once a week, the taxidermist's wife would take each skin and rearrange it in its box so that it wouldn't develop unnatural creases. There was a reverence to it, the way she tucked their tails and paws in. Sometimes we'd hear her speaking softly to the skins, You were so beautiful. Who'd ever wanna get over you, hey? Who'd ever wanna leave you behind?

Vending machine at the end of the world

He moved into a hotel that had my name and called most nights from the payphone in the hallway. Before that he used to call from a phone box on the corner of Second Avenue and Pine, and I could always hear sirens in the background, and drunks shouting at each other.
Fuck you motherfuckers, I can fly.
That was when he was sleeping in a park at night, and working during the day selling tickets over the phone for the Seattle Opera. The money he earned selling opera tickets he spent on beer and international phone cards. Then he cut down on beer and moved into the hotel that had my name. That kind of love scared the hell out of me. The kind of love that makes a person cut down on beer and move into a hotel just because of its name.

When he called it was nearly midnight for me but early morning for him. I lay on my stomach on the ugly grey carpet of the house that I grew up in, the phone cord stretched to the front door so I could blow cigarette smoke through the wire screen. I imagined him sitting with his face to the wall, ignoring the other residents as they tramped along the hallway. I imagined he still looked a little homeless.
jfk
once stayed here, he told me. Elvis stayed here. But now the cage elevators were breaking down twice, three times a week and it was fourteen flights of stairs to the room that housed his unrefrigerated forties and his stolen desk.

His two favourite topics of conversation were the Lesser Prairie Chicken, and a vending machine in Fremont that stood alone in the middle of a vacant block. The vending machine had an unlabelled mystery button underneath all of the labelled buttons for the usual drinks. He liked to speculate about what kind of soda would be dispensed if he were to push the mystery button. Would it be Tab or would it be Mr. Pibb? He rattled off a list of dead cola brands from his childhood, most of which I didn't recognise because his childhood was eleven years earlier than mine, and on the other side of the world.

I bet it's Tab, he finally said. He had turned the vending machine into a time travelling device. He wanted a Tab summer. He wanted it to be 1982 in Atlanta, Georgia, before the methadone trips to Mexico and the minor prison stints for
dui
. He wanted to be on his uncle's farm, raising Lesser Prairie Chickens. He wanted to be anywhere but Seattle, selling tickets for the opera.

One night he called and told me he'd gone to Fremont. He'd pushed the mystery button on the vending machine at the end of the world.

And you know what I got?

What'd you get? I asked.

Fucking Sprite.

And Atlanta, Georgia in 1982 was bleached out and unreachable and he and I had one less thing to talk about.

Dixieland

Friday night in a West Australian basement, and the six-man jazz band is playing Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans to sixty people who entered through a red phone box, ready to drink and dance like they were other people, and it was a different time and place. All the heat of the day is trapped in that room, and the place smells like sweat and brass. When the band introduce the numbers their accents are broad Australian, but when they sing it's pure Dixieland.

The elderly doorman is dancing slow swing with a young woman in a sequinned dress. Then the girl in the polka-dot dress, and the girl in the red lace dress. He switches girls after every song. All the girls are big-calved and soft-looking, and he moves them around the old floorboards with a sad grace.

He still wears his wedding ring, and when the band plays Sweet Lorraine he stops dancing. He always sits out for Sweet Lorraine, and watches the band from a small table which he and his wife donated to the club in the eighties. The table once contained an antique sewing machine, but the sewing machine is gone and all that remains is the cast-iron foot pedal, and an iron wheel which is beautiful and useless. He presses the foot pedal in time with the music and the wheel spins around but it isn't connected to anything. Sometimes he opens and closes the small drawers at the sides of the table, but there is nothing in the drawers now except for bottle caps and ticket stubs from the weekly raffle.

When Sweet Lorraine is over he stands again and goes back to the dance floor to dance with Lana, who is twenty-three and moves with the same elegant sadness. The elegance is something she picked up recently, but she was born with that sadness. They dance together for Louisiana Fairytale and Mack the Knife. They go wild for Tiger Rag. When Lana comes back to your table she is flushed and breathless. She laughs and kicks off her cork wedge sandals and you wish you could take her to Miami, drag her into the early retirement you always threaten when she wears those tacky shoes. You wish you could take her anywhere, that she'd let you make her happy.

The old tin signs on the walls advertise cigarettes and fountain pens that have been out of production for decades, and chewing gum and soft drinks that Australia got a taste for in the forties when the Yanks swept through with easy money and Coca-Cola. You're there in your plaid Texan shirt. Your best friend in her Florida retirement heels. Everyone in the low-ceilinged room dreaming America.