Fiction from The Literary Review

Fall

McKENZIE WARK

I tell three stories about me as a child. This is one: I'm running full pelt toward the dining table, bare feet flapping on the smooth blue lino. The big people at the table turn in my direction. Someone shouts a warning, as adults always do children. I run and I run, straight toward the table—and right under it. It's a good trick if you are a runty little kid. It gets their attention.
     You get used to things, acquire habits. It was my custom to run under tables. Until the time I ran full pelt toward the table, and banged my head square on its edge. Accustomed to the nature of tables and running, I was not accustomed to the nature of growth.
     This is the second story I tell about me as a child: The hall grows still, the voices lull. The good people in their good clothes turn their heads as the speaker mounts the podium, acknowledging their applause and stilling the air with his hand. I sit in a highchair, bored and disgusted. Food sits in front of me on the hinged tray.
     I do not want to make this food go in my body, but as it is food it can't just sit there on the hinged tray, in front of me. Grabbing the arms of the hinged tray with both hands, I jerk the tray up over my head, sending the food into orbit across the hall. It lands with a cartoon splat on the wall behind me. My family, horrified, bustle me out of the hall.
     Neither of these stories I tell are true. Oh, they happened. There are witnesses. But I have no memory of either event at all. I don't even have a memory of who told me these stories, or when. In truth, I know only that I don't know how I came to know these stories. The truth about true stories is we never know how they become true.
     Truth is, I remember nothing at all about me being a child. I remember sunlight on the orange tiles outside our house. A hand stretches. Light, heat bounce from tile to hand: heat, blood, skin, light, terra-cotta. I remember dust under the sofa. Fingers poke carpet, releasing fluffs of dust taste, dust smell, dust eye. These memories are true, only I am not present in them. They are memories of perceptions that I was not there to remember as being memories that belong to me.
     It was a memory that made me become me. Or so I recall. My father turns off the television and bids me join him on the slate grey vinyl sofa. He sits me across his knees. He speaks words, in a voice at once tender and grave. My mother, he says, is dead. And everything changes.
     Now I have an inside and an outside. He speaks to me of something that is outside, and it stays outside but now I have an inside that I am in, where this I is. And this inside becomes something separate from the world. Something that refuses the call of the world. Something that wants not to be part of this world where these things can happen. That mummy was sick was one thing and was bad but she was still, well, if not here then somewhere and now she is nowhere.
     Once there was waking and sleeping and eating and running. Once there was bumping about with the world and becoming bruised or soothed. Now there is the world and my body is in the world but I am not in the world, not if I can help it I'd rather not. This is not a story I ever tell.

Exposure

I have three mothers now. A mother puts chocolate Quik powder in a little enamelled tin cup that is cream with a black rim. I am only allowed to eat this little amount. I love to eat Quik straight from the can but I like it in milk too, especially if there is a bit floating on the top of the milk. Mother puts a little bit in the cup for me and I spoon in to get it but I'm impatient and I inhale some Quik and I cough and I'm choking and mother holds me and she laughs but she is not cross with me.
     Mother and me are a funny-shaped animal, I think although this is the kitchen and there is no mirror. She is a mammal that stands with a lump up about shoulder height leaning a bit so as not to topple over with the lump and she jigs up and down a bit and ooooh she says, softly. She puts me down on the bench and she is mother again and I am me again rather than a lumpy animal made of big body with small body joined through the clothes.
     A mother holds a book and from her and the book joined in her hands comes a story out of her mouth. This bed is strange. We are in a strange house in another place, A big place. This is not Newcastle this is Sydney and it is a long, long way away from home. It took hours to get here in a car. Just as I have a mother and father, they have a mother and a father too, but different ones. We are visiting somebody's mother and father but I am not sure which one. They are old and their house smells funny.
     I'm not happy, this is all too strange, but I'm being very good. So I get to hear any story I like. It's a story about Pooh bear who is my third favourite character in this book, after Eyore and Tigger. I am the donkey Eyore all alone in his field. I have a donkey my mother made me and I'm holding him now. He is grey with eyes of black stitches. He started to leak once, bleeding fluff and stuffing, but mother patched his neck with a grey patch and now he is fine.
     I am Eyore but I like stories about Pooh. The stories about Eyore are sad but the ones about Pooh are funny. Pooh wants to get the honey from the hive but it's too high up. He gets a blue balloon and he flies through the air like a cloud but the balloon bursts and he falls to the ground. I am Pooh bear flying with a balloon, but I don't like the way this story goes so I ask mother to change it and now I am Pooh bear flying with a green balloon and I fly and I fly and this story doesn't have to end.
     I think a mother who can make a story come out right so it doesn't have to end is just the best thing, and there is mother and me and my donkey in the bed where it is warm and I forget we are in and I like this strange house now as now it is the house with the endless story with the green balloon. Warm and safe and forever.
     A mother lies in bed only she is alone in bed in this memory. I am playing on the loungeroom floor. I have a booklet about road safety. It belongs to my brother or my sister, I think. It's the book you need to learn how to pass the test so you can drive a car. I want to start learning now so I can drive racing cars. I copy all the bits of road with the white and yellow markings onto paper and I join the paper together and I make roads out of paper and I drive my car on them.
     You can't overtake over a double yellow line but you can if it's a white line. If it's a white line and a yellow line sometimes you can and sometimes you can't and I haven't figured out why. Maybe mother will know. I go to the bedroom and open the sliding door. I see she is in bed and my father is there too. Jumping on the bed, waving the paper roads, chattering about them and asking lots of questions. She doesn't seem to be listening. Looking closely at her what shocks me into stillness is that I see that it is her face but it isn't really my mother. I am looking into her eyes and they look at me but it is not mother who is looking at me. She makes a sound but it is not her sound it is a terrible sound.
     My father scoops me up and takes me out of the room. Mother is very sick, he says, and it is very important that I am very good. This makes me think about being sick and how terrible it is to be sick. I had measles and chicken pox and I am mother with chicken pox and the feeling scares me and I want to hide. I throw the paper roads away.
     These are my three mothers. They are all I remember. But they are images so pure and strong that I am obliterated in them. They are glass, hard and hidden, cutting into mind whenever they choose.
     There is a fourth, but it is different. Not a child any more, just finished high school. I should be happy about this but all I can do is lie on the lounge all day and sleep, put the I to sleep. Its a different place to where I grew up. We moved away some years after mother died. I'm sleeping on the sofa, its brown corduroy cutting into my face, and when I wake sharp there she stands there, looking at me, and is gone.
     I lie there looking at the place where she stood. It really was her. Just like in her photographs. But I have no memory of what she looks like other than the photographs, so I don't know if this fourth mother is an impression of her that I remember but can't recall, or an impression of a photograph I remember, probably the one my father keeps in a frame under glass.
     Some people keep photos so they remember what people look like, but I don't remember what mother looks like, so I keep no photo. You can remember taking a photo but can you remember remembering?

Puppet Fire

They were famous, apparently. Not quite knowing what fame was, I just absorbed this idea that they were famous, and went along expecting to find out what famousness might be.
     At the theatre there were lots of children about as big as me but I did not know them. Each of the children seemed to be connected to an adult, so we did not form a pack of children together, but were held apart from each other by big people.
     The light throughout the theatre curls up, shrinking to the stage, leaving the seats dark. Puppets and puppeteers, the strings between them glisten. The puppet people loom, their presence only making the puppet show more magical.
     I remember nothing of the story, or even what the puppets look like. Only movement, pure movement. Puppet limbs fling perfect circles in the light, strings dangling and yanking arms and feet and heads and bodies, all gracing the air with no regard for the ground.
     We are puppets, we little ones, these are our movements. Adults exist so that as swoop turns to crash a hand is there to yank on a string, just before the big collision. The puppet, the child, becomes its movement. The audience, the theatre, loses itself in jerks of joy. A hand cups a grazed knee. Another hand holds a mother hand.
     All this was lost, lost in my fall into myself. I sit, someone separate, cradled on my father's knees as he tells me my mother is dead. The world became something other than myself, something limiting and ungraspable. People become something fearful. Fear that if I make something with them they might go away, like mother.
     The long years, the experiments. Looking for a way back, feeling for the way back. Back to puppet movement, back to arcing into the world, not stopped short by regard for the self, by fear for the self. That joy in becoming a blur of noise, a welter of limbs, that was lost when I fell into my skin.
     Biting on apples. Teeth thrust into juicy pulp, the scrop sound of sweet flesh tearing, acid, sugar and saliva mingling, the body juiced. Until the day when biting, teeth strike apple rot, body recoiling in disgust, spitting blackened apple, choking back puke. Thereafter the apple is something eyed with suspicion. I can no longer merge myself into appleness. I know something about what hides inside apples now, and a world closes to me.
     Holding an apple, but not biting it. I am locked in a self that can only feed on itself, condemned to a half-life that ends in therapy or fiction, complaining about limits to anyone who can be bribed to listen. But there might be another way out of the self and into the open space of mingling with the world. If there is a way to know without the limits of the self and its obsessions, to free sense from self, then sense can become free again.
     Something bad happened to the famous puppet theatre too. A fire burned all the puppets. But I was not sad when I heard this, shortly after I had seen them. I was happy for them. I knew they were not like people and would not feel pain. I thought of them laughing and dancing in the flames, bright colours turning brighter as they make the flames that turn them, like magic, into nothing.