GILLS

‘Open the gills. Someone please open those gills!’ my mother calls from her bedroom this morning, one of the rare Sundays we’re not skiing. She says gills for windows because that’s what they look like: tall, all-in-a-row, swing-out-sideways windows down every side of the house. And also because the humidity makes her feel like she’s breathing underwater. The gills are open day and night all summer except for storms, so when she carries on like this she must think we’ve gone around closing them.

Mum loves turning things into simple pictures. When we wanted to know how our stomachs work, she answered, ‘Just like little non-stop sewing machines.’ If we ask why the radio always has the news, it’s ‘So we’ll know if we’re invaded.’ And when the windshield of our old Triumph Mayflower smashed on the way to skiing last year, she shook the glass off her pleats and said one day windscreens would be made of see-through steel.

She’s forever telling me I’m Dad’s favourite, by far. ‘In fact, I’d go so far as to say you persecute your eldest and ignore your youngest,’ she told him in the car after skiing last week.

‘Persecute?’ I asked from the back seat.

‘Yes, always criticising.’

Maybe she’s right, I think, after we boys beg for turns to push the mower, when Dad tells my older brother he’s not pushing it nearly as fast as I did, ‘And he’s half your age.’ (I’m not half his age, of course — more like three quarters.) And this could also be why, instead of going to the dentist to remove a molar after I ‘put on a show’, Dad let me be operated on. But I’ll never, ever, do that again, because the chloroform gave me evil nightmares of being crushed by some hot, buzzing, chainmesh blanket.

Sometimes I think my father just likes criticising and playing jokes on anyone at random, not just on my older brother. When we went fishing for the first time, he stopped at a bait shop to buy us some gear. ‘Who wants a rod and who wants a reel?’ he asked. ‘And be snappy.’ I’d never heard of either, but surely a longer word bought more gear, so I chose ‘reel’. But my brothers, who’d yelled ‘rod’, were soon unbuttoning long shiny packets to pull out beautiful segmented black rods to screw together, while I was left nursing what looked like a miniature plastic wheel rim with a few strands of nylon around it. Not only this, but their rods actually included a reel.

And it’s Dad my older brother suddenly runs upstairs to this afternoon after I call him the world’s worst swear word in a backyard fight. Watching them jog back down, I know I’m in for it. When they pull up, my brother stands with legs wide apart and arms folded, and Dad says, ‘Now, let’s get both sides of this story.’

Both sides? I wonder. Surely there’s just one: I swore, and now I’m in trouble. But amazingly my tongue’s already worked out this both-sides business when it answers, ‘I, I thought it was the same as those other unt words you call us when you’re angry — runts and munts — because there’s only a one-letter difference.’ As soon as this is out, he turns and heads for the house, my brother left standing with only his mouth wide open now, though I must have taken a clip under the ear, because a slight sting’s started up.

Barely a minute after my brother skulks back to the house, Mum’s skipping down the stairs as fast as her loafers can carry her, calling, ‘I hope you don’t think you’ve gotten off that lightly.’ Next thing, I’m being hauled inside by my left ear until we’re at the bathroom sink, where she skids a cake of Cashmere Bouquet across the facecloth she’s soon poking around inside my mouth to mop up what’s left of the filthy swear word. ‘Soap must taste fabulous,’ she’s saying for the whole house to hear, ‘because it’s only one letter different from soup,’ when Dad calls back from the lounge, ‘Good one, Betty.’ Soap doesn’t taste fabulous, of course. It just tastes spotless and slimy, and could never be mistaken for food, even if it is a cake.

Mum has even told me, and everyone else, that I was Dad’s favourite before I was born. ‘How could that be if I wasn’t even alive?’ I usually ask.

‘Oh, you’ll hear about it one day,’ is all she ever says back.

•

Last week, the President of America was killed. When the news about President Kennedy being shot in the head started playing on the radio in our lounge room, my mother stopped sweeping to say ‘shush’, and all I remember now is that shush, a news flash, and floorboards being half-swept forever.

Tomorrow we leave for Sydney, where Dad has a new job running the Regent cinema in George Street. So today we’re visiting the McFarlys for sandwiches and a last goodbye. After a while sitting around on their lawn, we move upstairs, where their house is the same as ever: louvres opened wide, the usual smell of that big grey Sunday chunk of meat boiling all day in its tall pot, dark varnished doorjambs hung with curtains not doors, all the McFarly girls skirt-whirling between Singer sewing machines in their black hair-curler hair and black framed glasses, and everyone talking low except Elvis Presley in the radio singing ‘and I don’t have a woo-den heart’ and then Wayne Newton going on about his donkey Shane.

When we’re leaving, Mrs McFarly brings out going-away gifts, including packets of plastic farm animals for us boys. Before climbing into our car for the second-last time in Rocky, I run back under their house for a final look at their brand-new green VW Beetle, and stroke the badge on its bonnet.

After an all-day drive the next day, Dad pulls over at a Brisbane corner store and comes back with a large bottle of Tristram’s Lemonade. ‘Tristram’s is the best lemonade in the world,’ he gasps after the world’s longest swig, before passing what’s left around. An hour later, we pull into the Nobby Beach caravan park on the Gold Coast for the night.

As we’re called to bed, I’m crouched outside the toilet block, scratching a hole in the ground to bury the McFarlys’ farm animals so I can come back and dig them up one day when they’ll have turned to stone. At least that’s what happened to an entire Siberian forest on the news the other night. A petrified forest, the news reader said. As my mother explained, ‘Thousands of trees all fell over in the mud one day, and after a long time the minerals turned them to stone.’

‘How many years again, Mum?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know — squillions.’