Butterscotch

K.A. Rees

I t started with breath. Hers and her mother’s. August escaped her mother’s hot angriness as she yelled after her, only been in the family for generations. Her mother’s words shot behind her retreating feet. It was because it was one of Gran Bauer’s glasses. She wouldn’t have cared so much if it was the ones from Dad’s family. She heard her dad’s voice raised, ‘She’s only little. Why did you expect her to clean the table if you didn’t want broken glass?’ More yelling. And then footsteps retreating along the gravel drive—a car door slamming and the tyres skidding, bits of gravel airborne; the car with her dad accelerated away. She ran to the drive after him, but he was already out the property gate. Gone.

August knew what her mother’s breath looked like—it was dust. Small, brown, particulate. If you breathed it in you needed to expirate. August learned the words on the spelling test for October last year. Now it was January. She watched grass die beneath her feet. Apt. That was another word, but she thought it was too short to be on the list. August weighed the relationship between her mother’s breath and her words: the words were a known quantity. They were known at school, the medical centre and at the mechanic’s. And in her head, especially there. He’s gone August. Never to return. Like she’d crossed out the lines of a wayward letter. Not at this address. Return to sender. Her mother’s words took up too much space. August was bricked tight.

August hated the shopping. Wherever she was dragged, they would bump into someone or other and her mother would stop to tilt her head—nodding arrhythmically, displaying her listening ear; waiting for the intake of their breath mid-sentence and then she would pounce. ‘Still fixing up the finances, no not a word. It’s very difficult. Yes, night shift at the cannery. August does bedtime. She doesn’t mind looking after Michael, do you love?’ And August would nod, complicit in this thing she called who had it worse, but can’t complain. And August felt guilty; not once did she stick up for him. She knew she had to let her mum tell these stories. Otherwise, she brought her anger home and spread it around. On every surface of the house.

* * *

Her dad used to play guitar on the veranda. On the northern side of the house a jacaranda leaned in like an unwelcome guest, said her mother, but August loved it; that side of the veranda was cool and in mid-spring, when the tree was in full bloom, purple flowers fell to the floor creating a thick sweep of lilac. She would sit under its dome with her father, listening to the sound of his guitar lengthening the afternoons.

Michael didn’t remember their dad. August countered this by telling him stories of a man who almost always showed as the dinner was being cleared away, his long shadow darkening the door. It was this moment she waited for—eating her dinner slowly, glancing up at the clock as the minutes ticked loudly, moving the food around her mouth to make it last—even if it was tuna bake, which she hated, so she could still be awake when he got home. But her mother would say go to bed and August fell asleep listening for the sound of the Datsun travelling up the gravel drive. Her mother despised the Datsun. Whoever heard of a two-door for a farm car? It’s hardly a ute. It was what her mother called impractical.

She also hated the colour. Diarrhoea, her mum said when her dad first brought the car up the drive. Butterscotch, her father shot back, hurt.

August had a picture in her head of what he looked like now. A photo in a frame she carried behind her eyes, like facial mapping technology checking for points to flash a match on the screen. Points for the shaggy brown hair that cascaded across his eyes, the way when he swept it from his brow it would expose his palm cracked, the skin weathered and stained with engine oil. Points for the light dusting of freckles that ran across the bridge of his broad nose. Points for his large dark eyes she could still see herself in, even after all these days, weeks, months. Years. She liked his freckles; they made him look young. August remembered how he used to laugh; that was the Holden, before the Datsun—by the time he had the Datsun, the smiles didn’t come so easily. August would sit in the back in the slushy morning light watching air in the cab condense, steam rising from their breath alone. Dad said no farting, otherwise he’d wind the window down if you let one go. But it was always him in the end that did it, and he would pretend that you did, sitting in the back seat. Back then even August’s mum laughed. A dry laugh, like leaves broken open.

August told Michael of the man who had a voice like one of the three tenors and who smelt of beer and sweat and turpentine. Sometimes something sweet clung to his breath. Like he’d been sucking on a Werther’s, it made her warm and caramel. Whenever she smelt it, she remembered the light in his room on the farm— how it spilled across the floor catching on the echoed limbs of the coral tree shadowed against the grain.

August made things up, to remind Michael of the man he did not remember. She hoped to forge a connection for him through her memories but she mused that sometimes, Michael only listened because she made the stories interesting: their dad worked for the government on bioterrorism, and was off on important business saving the country from chemical and other ecological disasters. It was why he wasn’t with them. He was needed elsewhere. She wanted the tracery of these words to hold: she marvelled at them, how they were wrought, but they were edged too fine and crumbled.

Michael picked up discrepancies so the stories needed modification. Sometimes, her tales were so elaborate she ran the risk of their mother coming home on a break and catching the two of them still awake. August knew her mother would be disgusted. Lies, she would say, the inky kohl she applied before the start of each shift smudged into the cracks around her eyes.

Michael finally fell asleep. She turned his night light on. He had a turtle that glowed faint green, its tummy projecting stars onto the wall. The passageway between Michael’s room and the kitchen was bone cold. August shivered, turned all but the porch light off. She left that light on—when it was working—for her mother. There was only the one heater. August would have to wait till Michael was deep in sleep before pushing its sticky wheels down the hall to her room. August’s room had a flat coldness to it, an unoccupied feel that failed to warm even when she was in it. It wasn’t like her room on the farm where she could feel her blood expanding, encompassing the cracks and corners, seeping into the textured floorboards. But her favourite room was her dad’s study. It had a slanting, natural light that probed through Venetians half closed from dust. Her thoughts turned once again to the man with the guitar; the man who smelt of cigarettes and turpentine and beer. She fell asleep blanketed in her memory.

August wanted to discover more about the mystery of her father’s disappearance and did so by stealth, but her enquiries made their way back. Don’t wheedle people August! Her mother’s mouth twisted. August called her pigheaded and was grounded.

One time, August found an old photo album. There was a picture of August in a long flowing dress. Her mum was holding her with her dad looking awkward in his suit; his arm around August’s mother’s shoulder. They looked much younger. Zach was there too. Zach was her godfather; her dad’s best friend. In this photo it was just the four of them.

Her mother kept it. Just this one. When she looked through other albums, she found no more pictures of her dad. August thought this was her mother’s way of saying that Zach had a place in the family. She decided she would ask him. August had a feeling that he was forever biting his tongue against the words he didn’t want to flow.

Late once, she caught her mum and Zach at the kitchen table. Zach had driven her mother home. August got up when she heard a different car parking on the street in front of the house. Her mother’s car had broken down. That’s what she said when August grilled her about it. By the time August finished in the bathroom, they had come inside and were speaking in low voices at the kitchen table. She snuck a peek from the hall, her mother holding the stem of a glass of white wine, Zach opposite her, one of his large calloused hands holding her mother’s unoccupied one. They were speaking in fish-hook whispers, snagging the conversation back and forth across the sandy riverbed of talk. August imagined she was hearing voices underwater, and she put her arms up to feel liquid surround her. And then she heard her mother say how hard it was, that she got nothing back from August, that August blamed her. She surfaced cold.

August beat a retreat out the back of the house, through razor grass etched in the field. She felt the blades snick wet against the hem of her nightdress. She stopped, stood watching her breath, trying to catch up to the wet wine of her mother’s words. A streak of sulphur-crested cockatoos banked hard against a gust that had risen with the spreading light. As she walked she swatted away new day flies with a strand of kangaroo grass yanked from the soil. Her mother found her difficult! When she did everything she was asked. Looked after Michael every evening after school, allowed no time for herself to do normal stuff, to muck about. She couldn’t wait to leave the crappy fibro with its stained walls. She couldn’t wait to leave the school she was stuck in, looking at the back of Maggie Nguyen’s head day after day after day. Then, when she was gone, maybe her mother might realise how lonely this place was. How, when the dark descended, she could hear every creak and groan of the old wooden frame, as if the house was trying to disgorge them into the night. Even the television did not shut out the sounds of its creaking complaints. But there was Michael. She did not want to leave him; she wanted to take him with her. When he was older, he wouldn’t need her as much as he did now so she wouldn’t have to feel guilty about leaving him with just their mother. Michael would go too, eventually. She had an image of the two of them feeding seagulls on a beach somewhere in Sydney.

She would find her dad.

* * *

When August was in the mood to admit certain things, she understood what she knew about her father could be counted on fingers and toes. Then, there were the things that people said about him. There were more of these, but they were contradictory and confused her. Some things she overheard she wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to be hearing them—there was always something harsh in the way they were said: ‘Never could hold his drink.’‘Only a coward leaves his wife and kids.’‘I reckon she was having an affair.’‘You know he had a temper?’‘Pity for the kiddies.’‘She works nights now.’‘His best mate threw him out on his arse.’‘They lost the farm, you know.’‘Always down the pub.’ Words were sharp, like shards. They, the ones who said it, sent each other looks, eyebrows raised when they knew she was there. Then, they turned away, co-conspirators. She wasn’t supposed to understand.

She did.

They were trying to let her know her world was a small, closed thing. And she was not very important.

And sometimes, when August forgot to cover up that she understood the things that they said, her mother did not fly off the handle. She sat her down on the bed and cupped her hand. Once, her mother’s voice wavered and her eyes watered and she gave August a prickly hug. August was appalled: she’d never actually seen her mother cry. Her mother tended to sob behind doors, prone on the bed with a pillow over her head to dampen the sound of her tear-streaked breath. When she opened the door, August noted the blotchy face and puffy eyes.

* * *

Zach unfurled when her mother was sick with flu. They’d been tasked with the takeaway run. August remembered the drive back in the car; it was raining. Zach had the driver’s side window down, smoking a cigarette. She remembered her father smoking in the Datsun too. It was warm and moist and she smelled chemicals pulling past her out the open window. Why did he leave, Zach? The words hung, despite their motion. Above, metallic clouds were crowding out the starch sky. Zach pulled over to the curb, out of the car.

He didn’t answer until he returned with the takeaway. He turned the key in the ignition and switched it off again, ran his hands through his wavy hair. She could smell the takeaway sweating on the back seat. The vinyl was wet with rain that beaded through the open window. The sky above cracked, flashed purple, then rain ran in rivulets down the window, drummed fortissimo across the roof. August was covered by the absence of his words; the rain slapping the roof. She held her breath. Zach used his forearm to wipe a patch on the driver’s side. Then the words came. Her mum and dad argued. A vase was smashed. Her mother was heartbroken. And then furious. Something else was thrown and something else broken, there were threats. August heard a wet thing dislodge in Zach’s throat.

I chucked your dad out, August. I told him to go. Zach looked past her to the street lights that had come on, to rainwater spilling down gutters carved in the side of the road.

Her dad loved her. They were mates—she used to ride on his shoulders and put her arms around his neck and cry giddy-up. It wasn’t like Zach said, don’t come back. He could still come home. How could he forget?

* * *

Zach didn’t drink. She knew this now because she waited on tables in bars with drunken couples and served men in pubs with sun-burned noses. There were lots of words tossed around but not many of them she believed or chose to remember. Serving in diners watching the darkened faces of truckies under baseball caps, stubbing out cigarettes in the roadside ditch away from the fumes of the petrol bowsers, watching the cars pull in. Looking for his face. She worked behind the bar, mucking out the women’s toilets after Saturday nights rolled around and everyone went batshit crazy. The next day, the regulars also forgot.

In a blue-lit laundromat she stared at the black and white tiles, too tired to do anything but flick her way through magazines, peering at the captions under the fleshy photos of famous people. She saved cash for rent. She knew no one, but she also knew that the only dirt in the city was from pollution and she could catch a bus to the beach on her day off. She forgot the town, the smell of the river, the sound that the wind made through the trees; the clatter of the birds as they flew home to roost in dusky evenings. She no longer saw iridescent pinks and blues bursting across the heavens, raining tiny insects in the twilight. She forgot her mother with the lines around her mouth, and the smudges under her eyes. She also forgot her brother and the phone messages he left; the tired voice imploring: she’s getting worse, you coming home. The edge to his voice, the implication. In her mind she saw her classmates who stayed, saw her brother; they were caught in a vortex, a country town-sized black hole where everything was frozen and where she was frozen too.

Zach came for her. Told her about the phone box a kilometre from the pub where he would call, covered in urine, on his knees. Or Mal ringing Zach from the pub, he’s passed out on one of the pool tables, come and get him. He got aggressive like a dog in the yard, wanting to bloody noses, bite heads. He loved shots especially schnapps, sink the eight ball and you had a reason to line them up on the bar. One for everyone. Make it two. Funny guy. But Zach wasn’t laughing. Instead, Zach told her how he kept a clean set of clothes in the boot of his car. At least that way he wouldn’t go home smelling of piss. ‘Back to us,’ August said. ‘He always smelled of the pub.’ On occasion, something worse. Vomit. There was the other smell, too. It must have been when he played pool. On those occasions, he smelt like butterscotch.