Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 15, Issue 3

  Review of Australian Fiction, 15:3

  Volume Fifteen: Issue Three

  Brenda Walker & Maria Papas

  Zutiste, Inc.

  Review of Australian Fiction, 15:3 Copyright © 2015 by Authors.

  Contents

  Imprint

  Mouse Brenda Walker

  Fish Maria Papas

  Published by Review of Australian Fiction

  “Mouse” Copyright © 2015 by Brenda Walker

  “Fish” Copyright © 2015 by Maria Papas

  www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com

  Mouse

  Brenda Walker

  Inside the building next to the car park there is a flight of stairs that leads to the floor where the mice live. If you want to work with mice you must put on special clothing, heavy white plastic boots, gloves and a mask. You must walk through a sequence of doors, you must not carry bacteria from the outside world with you. This is to protect the mice from contamination. The mice live in translucent boxes. Their eyes are pink bubbles in their short fur. Most of them are sleepy, or they’re gently active: lab-mice. At the far end of the room there is a high-sided zinc tub. Wild mice live in the depths of this tub. As you approach they leap and leap, sliding and re-launching inexhaustibly. They cannot reach the lip of the tub. If they could, if they could scramble over the lip and fall without breakage, there would be no way for them to escape. This would not prevent them from running, running, running across the floor of the lab. If I possibly can, I avoid the zinc tub. I don’t want to set them off. Occasionally I held mice like this in shearing sheds in the wheatbelt when I was a child: mice that were frozen with shock yet speedily cardiac, capable of springing from my hands without injury and running, with swift unhesitating intelligence, straight back to a hiding place under the floor.

  I’m a trainee animal technician. It’s my first job, apart from working on the cash register in the general store in the wheatbelt. My family still work there every day, selling biscuits, noodles, tough vegetables and long-life milk, cheap ice cream and frozen loaves of bread: basic provisions for farmers. Some of the farmers are trapped in their big paddocks: too hard up for a weekly drive to the city supermarkets.

  I’ve worked with animals for a few months, not counting the week I took off when I had the accident. The lab mice in their sawdust-lined boxes look at me with their tiny bubble eyes. They sniff and scramble. In their position, I too would groom myself or doze or scramble, I would touch the mouse next to me with shivering whiskers, I would build a shelter out of the toilet rolls and kitchen paper we give them for bedding: each shelter a little different from the others. I would look at me: the source of clean water and biscuits. Whenever I see an animal doing something, it makes a certain kind of sense. It’s people I have trouble with. I wear gloves but my hands always smell of wood-shavings and mouse. My last name should be Mouse.

  At the time of the accident I was spending my nights driving through the suburbs with Joss, who I met in the cafeteria near the animal house. He was a law student, working part-time as a process server. I waited in his car while he handed people legal documents, usually from the Family Court. It was quiet in the expensive car, and dark. I drive a Holden Astra with a steady oil leak that didn’t smell anything like Joss’s car. The first time I went out with Joss I expected to hear dogs bark, but the suburbs he worked in were fenceless and unguarded.

  Once I saw a big domestic rabbit, the kind that used to be called a meat rabbit, hop slowly down the road under the streetlights. A door slammed, but the rabbit ignored it.

  People usually accepted their documents. They’d switch on their outdoor lighting and open their doors and smile helplessly, with reflex civility, as they took the papers that Joss held out to them. We went from one address to the next, until he finished work and we had the night and the car and finally his apartment to ourselves.

  The apartment was high in a tower block. You could stand on a balcony and look down, over forty floors above the ground. The car and the apartment had belonged to Joss’s grandmother. She died before Joss and me got together.

  Joss didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He was often quietly, steadily drunk and the boot of the car was full of emptied bottles from his grandmother’s store of wine. He could barely speak to strangers for shyness. It made him good at his job: who could be angry with such a nervous, apologetic man? Who would bother to hide when he shuffled up their path like an emissary of a small wronged religion, and who would guess that this religion was the law? As I drove from street to street his narrow hand lay promisingly, shyly, on my knee, while his other hand held an open bottle of wine. By the time we got back to the apartment Joss was too drunk to kiss.

  In the mornings I watched him sleep. The bed was so big we didn’t carry our dinner plates out to the sink. A tray with sticky dishes piled onto it lay to one side of our feet. I stopped dreaming, in this bed. My nights were blank. My body was the only part of me that was comfortable.

  The accident happened in Joss’s car. He misjudged a curve and dodged a truck, but the car left the road at an embankment and rolled twice before it landed in a garden. For a while I was high in the air, drunk and full of wonderment, then blood and gravel flew everywhere. Powder exploded from inflated airbags. The car was full of pale dust. In the distance, a siren started up.

  The woman who owned the garden we crashed into came to the hospital with a basket of figs and asked me to visit her when I got over my concussion. She offered to phone my parents, but I didn’t want them to arrive and take me back to a stool behind the cash register in the grocery shop in the country, where I would have to wrap loaf after loaf of frozen bread in stretch plastic.

  Joss was uninjured. I couldn’t stop thinking about those people who held their hands out, politely, to take documents from him. The way they felt they had to be nice about it. Joss was the kind of person who would always be hurt, but basically uninjured. He was different from me, in that way. For a few days after I was released from hospital I folded my arms so tightly my muscles ached. Then I relaxed and told him it was over. I was never going to sleep up in the sky with him again. I could say I walked away, but I was more rabbity than that; I shuffled forward, stopped and moved again, slowly, without listening to the sad commotion behind me.

  I had plenty of time to read the newspapers on Sunday, after I stopped seeing Joss. My work with mice doesn’t pay well, so I live in a bedsit with a front door that opens onto a concrete walkway. The building has strict rules prohibiting the ownership of animals. When I get to the Pets section of the Classifieds I slow down and circle ads with a black pen, imagining that I could buy a dog or a cat to sit beside me, as Joss did, in his grandmother’s car or propped up in bed in her apartment, speechless in the darkness of the early evening.

  I see myself driving into the country in my Holden Astra to buy a kelpie. In the far corner of a shed, behind a rusting harvester, a dog lies with her last pup clambering backwards and forwards over her ribs. She’s thin from nursing. I take the twisting, nipping pup from the farmer’s hands and settle it in the crook of my arm. It tries to turn and sniff my fingertips, which smell, always, of mouse. In my car the puppy begins to cry from within his nest in the animal carrier on the back seat, and the high and continuous cry sounds like the kind of noise I have been making, inside my mind, since I left the country.

  I live in a bedsit without a pet or a boyfriend. On Monday at 8.30 I show up at the lab and pull on overalls, which cover my shirt and jeans. I adjust my face-mask and cover my hair. Mice look up to me, from their sawdust floors. I’m told when to kill them. Some of the mice live in an extremely sterile env
ironment, away from the ordinary lab mice and the wild mice. Their immune system has been destroyed and replaced by a human one. When you experiment on a humanised mouse it’s just like experimenting on a person. No element of mousiness distorts the data. They’re black glossy mice with black tails. When I fill their drink bottles they watch me closely and their eyes are like small bubbles of shiny blackness. They don’t live long. They can’t cope with being humanised. But who can, I ask myself, looking over a car park through a set of airtight windows. Who can?

  Fish

  Maria Papas

  She was interstate when she heard about the dead fish. She was interstate and in her hotel room after a long and inhospitable day when her sister called to say that the twins’ father had brought a dead fish into the house.

  She always called him that—the twins’ father—even before he started hiding his wedding ring, even before everything that happened, happened. He was Cam and April’s father, or ‘Andrew’, but never ‘my husband’ or ‘my partner’, and certainly not ‘my ex’. She always hated how people referred to an ‘ex’ as if somehow they accepted the shift from roses to toxic text messages as normal, natural even. No, an ‘ex’ wouldn’t do. And not just because she had trouble with words like ‘boyfriend’ or ‘my man’ or even ‘fiancé’ before, but also because the thought of Andrew carrying on about his ‘ex’ and ‘you know how exes are’ did something to her nervous system comparable only to being late for an interview and winding up stuck in traffic. Exes, as far as she was concerned, belonged in the past.

  That’s why he still got to her; she couldn’t pack him into a neat shoebox of memories. Every weekend there was some kind of crossover: dropping the children off, picking them up, enduring the endless complaints that these kids didn’t listen to him, they just didn’t listen. And then there were the little things. Like the practicalities of keeping the children inside their routine and inside their regular home and as close to their preschool as possible. Against her better judgement she actually agreed to let him stay while she was at her conference, and so she laid out a clean towel, and remade the bed, and even shook that bottom sheet before spreading it out so that it was creaseless and tight. And then she called her sister. Will you come by and check on the canaries, and water the plants from time to time?

  And her sister laughed and said, it’s kind of funny that you trust him to keep the children alive but not the herbs.

  It was ludicrous, she knew, but she insisted. Please, she said, bringing the birdseed out of the pantry. Please feed them at least every second day, and sing to them, and hang their cage beneath their tree.

  The fish never seemed happy to her. He had bought them the moment he got his own place: four little fish in four little individual tanks, which he displayed like ornaments on a bookshelf. And she was so hurt back then, not because he had moved out, but because the care he was taking was not a care she had seen before. Their most frequent arguments, if she remembered correctly, revolved around the way he stuffed their living space full of excess, and then, conversely, the way she threw everything out. And now in his new house there was a vase on the table, dishes neatly stacked away and of course the fish and the succulents he intended to plant out the back. When she first dropped the children off she looked at this new place—the lamp in the lounge and the doona over his bed—and everything seemed so lovely that she wondered if his previous mess, the mess of their marriage, was in some part a reaction to her. She wondered what was making him try again—another woman maybe, his newfound freedom, the lack of criticism—and somewhere deep in her head she blamed herself for the entirety of their marriage breaking down. Even the heater he had booted across the dining room. Even the sliding door he had buckled off the railings. There was something wrong with her, she thought. There had to be, because suddenly his problem wasn’t a problem at all.

  But then the succulents dried out on top of the washing machine, and the unopened envelopes piled up, and the dirty dishes began to sprawl in the same way suburbs do. On one of those crossover days, she stood at his set of shelves and watched these fish—four little fish in four little slimy tanks no bigger than the tissue box she kept in her car—and she felt for them, all four of them: unable to touch or speak or interact, and she wanted to take them and buy them a bigger tank, one with bubbles and filters and daily sprinkles of food. But she thought, no, she was done fixing things and making them better. Plus it was important to love. Perhaps him having pets was a good thing.

  So when her sister called and said he brought his fish to the house, she said, well that’s nice.

  And her sister said, not really, one of them is dead.

  Are you sure?

  Yes I’m sure. It’s dead, sunk down at the bottom of the tank, and the house stinks like off salmon past the use by date. Then she said, I shouldn’t have told you. And then, I think at least another one is sick. Your house smells.

  It was a Wednesday night, a lonely night between friends, and not the kind of night where she felt like being on her own, and all she could think of was this dead fish sunk down at the bottom of the tank, and Andrew just leaving it there, and the smell, and her canaries, and their sensitive little lungs. And then she thought of the other fish looking through the glass, looking at that horrible aquatic death. And her children too, sensing that something wasn’t right, sensing it, but without the means to acknowledge what had just gone on.

  I asked him about it, her sister said. He told the children it was sleeping.

  Sleeping, she echoed.

  Yes, sleeping, her sister replied. Anyway, I’d better get going.

  The phone clicked shut. The hotel room seemed somehow dimmed, more lonely than before. A car lit the window, and then the window went black again. Somebody’s footsteps filled the hall. Voices. Coming in. Or more likely going out.

  She thought about making a cup of tea.

  She thought of her canaries right next to that dead fish and the gases curling out of the water.

  And then she thought of that fish at the bottom of the aquarium, and Andrew telling the children it was asleep, and their eyes wide and inquisitive, ready to believe anything and anyone. And there he was, their father, lying like he had lied when their grandfather died. Exactly the same, actually. Avoiding. Not mentioning. Like he always did. And it made her angry. Because deep down, deep in her heart, she really did see them as her children. Yes, they were HER children; she was the one who carried them and nursed them and looked after them six nights out of seven. They were HER children, and there was a dead fish in her house, sunk at the bottom of the tank while three other fish looked on. And the canaries looked on. And her children looked on. And it broke her heart to think of the two of them, like Hansel and Gretel, every night with their dad, sprinkling food-flakes into that tank, sprinkling and waiting and wondering why that fish never got up.

  And so she called.

  What’s up with the dead fish?

  What? he said, his voice crackling over a tenuous connection.

  I heard your fish is dead.

  It’s a non-issue, he said.

  But it was an issue to her. I want to talk about it, she said.

  Well it’s not up for discussion.

  I want to… she began again.

  I said, NOT UP FOR DISCUSSION.

  Then he started going on in his usual way, interrupting any time she tried to speak, going on in that voice of his, going on about the way she needed to know everything, control everything, make every decision, going on and on and ending with, I just can’t see how me not cleaning up a dead fish affects you when you’re all the way there and I’m here.

  But it wasn’t cleanliness she was worried about.

  Always thinking he knew what she was going to say.

  When she finally came home, it was as if her place had exploded. Every drawer, the pantry, the fridge. It was like he put his hand in there and just scrambled everything around, just put his hand in and shook it all up. And the empty Sorbent rol
ls that he had flung in the bath, and the toys all up and down the steps, and her daughter’s hairclips beneath her feet, and the skid mark at the bottom of the toilet—that skid mark, god how that reminded her of her marriage—and the crusty food plates everywhere, and of course the fish that had been dead for six days now, a film growing around him, fixing him to the bottom of the tank. It was cruel, wasn’t it? To leave this fish unceremoniously at the bottom of the tank. And then her son running up to tell her that Boots was no longer swimming about.

  He’s not swimming, Cam?

  No, he said, he’s not. And then he paused. That’s because he got dead.

  He got dead?

  Yes.

  She went to Cam then, and picked him up. How does that make you feel?

  Sad, he said.

  Sad, she repeated.

  Yes, he said, because Dad thought he was sleeping, but then he kept sleeping, and that meant he got dead. That’s what happened.

  She looked at the twins’ father, and he looked back at her, and for a moment she felt something rise in her which she had to stuff back down like socks in a full suitcase.

  Then he said, you just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?

  So she turned and took Cam to the lounge room, and plonked him down next to his sister and the cartoons, and she told him—she told both of them actually—if they wanted to talk about it later, they could. And then she went up the stairs.

  And started tidying.

  Because that’s what she did when her emotions ran out of control: stripping the bed for fresh sheets; looking at that skid mark and thinking, he surely does this on purpose; walking back down the stairs to throw the spent toilet rolls in the recycling bin; throwing other things in the bin too, like that empty packet of green aeroplane jelly that was just sitting around; tidying the pantry; sliding the third bottle of vinegar he brought to her house to the side—for he always brought her vinegar ever since he realised she hated the taste of it. And she thought, yes, he does this on purpose, and then she thought of Cam, day one, knowing his fish had died and having to maintain that sleeping charade, six days of participating in that lie, and she threw that empty box of jelly out again, and moved the three packets of pasta to the back, and the four kilos of potatoes—of course there were now four kilos of potatoes in her pantry—and then she marched back up the stairs and sat on her unadorned mattress.