After school I stop by the drain where we found the arm. It starts beside the cage for unwanted calves and ends at the ditch cutting along the perimeter of McGregor’s farm. The day of the arm, when the tar became soft and sticky and we were giddy with the coming summer break, we had crawled through it. Jack first then me.
I think enough time has passed, I’m ready to crawl through it again. I put my schoolbag before me, drop down to the grass on hands and knees and I enter the drainpipe. The concrete is hard on my palms and shins and it gets harder the deeper I crawl. The end is a bright circle, pickle green grass, flattened where the water normally runs. I turn my elbows in against my body. Dad once said, rats can compress their bodies to the size of their head, so if they can get their head in they can get their body in. I think if I really needed to, I could make myself smaller, I could draw my bones, organs, limbs into myself. He had said that when we found the rat, its back snapped with only a coppery spot of blood on the wooden trap. He had lifted it by the tail and dropped its stiff body in the rubbish bag then smeared his hand down the outside of his thigh and grinned at me.
There’s something soothing about being at the centre of the drainpipe. I lay there still in the darkness for a moment, just listening to the sounds. When I say hello the word bounces around me. A car passes on the road above. It’s all drumming and paint rollers, then no sound at all. I remember the fly landing on my face when I was last in the drainpipe; all I could do was shake my head, then it would land on my face again. When I looked out at Jack, standing there in the ditch, a fly crawled on his cheek. It stopped for a moment and rubbed its legs together but Jack still didn’t swat it. He was just staring at something. Then, when I followed his gaze to the arm, I stopped shaking my head and just stared along with him. There were more flies, circling above it, crawling all over it.
I reach the end of the drainpipe. Looking out into the ditch, I half expect it to still be there, pale and bloated with the fingers half curled like dead flowers. But there is no arm, just ragwort and a coke can faded so it’s no longer red but golden.
I can’t turn around in the drain so I climb out and stand where Jack had stood. The mud is slicked beneath my school sandals. The rest of the walk home, I loop my string between my fingers in bows and knots. I count the movement it takes to make a cat’s cradle. One two three four five . . .
Jack’s in the lounge watching TV. He has physio every day after school and when Mum gets in she drops the groceries, huffs out her breath and calls, “Jack, come on. We’re late.” Then to me. “Help me get your brother in the car, please.”
Jack does most of the work himself, dragging his legs into the front seat. I fold down his chair and push it into the boot. Then they’re gone, zipping away in the new Honda, a snake of dust rising from the gravel driveway. I take out the string from the kitchen drawer and cut a piece as long as my forearm. I take a book from the shelf. The one with the rabbit standing on its hind legs on the cover. I wrap the string around it and tie it off with a double knot then I place it back on the shelf.
Dad gets home and I haven’t peeled the potatoes so the first thing he does is pick up the remote and thrust it at the TV to turn it off.
“Potatoes, now,” he says, all teeth and wide eyes.
“Okay.”
Then he puts his work clothes in the wash and comes out in a sweater and jeans. He goes to the fridge and grabs a Double Brown, when the can snaps open he closes his eyes and scrapes his palm up his forehead.
“Your mother out with Jack?”
“Yeah.”
“You not giving her hell this afternoon?”
“Nope.”
He clears his throat into his fist. “I’ve still got to go fix a trough in the paddock. Reckon you can cut those up and put them on the boil, after you’ve peeled ‘em?”
I nod. He roughs my head and says “good man.” Then he is out the door with his Double Brown and the motorbike starts up. Mum hates the four-wheeler, but Dad says we still need it. He says you can’t blame the bike and I guess he’s right. I used to ride it sometimes but last time I straddled the back of it, and started the engine Mum had rushed from the house. Her voice was stretched like old blue tack, Get down from there. She jerked me by my wrist. Then I heard a crack. I didn’t realise what had happened at first, the left half of my face was hot and numb. Mum was just staring at her hand then she turned on her heels and paced back towards the house, leaving me standing there, crying.
I make some toast, picking the green bits off the bread and coating it with peanut butter. I know it’s wrong to eat before dinner but Dad won’t be back for a while.
I think of Jack sprinting across the lawn and Dad throwing the ball to him. Jack could catch it without breaking stride. Then he would fend off invisible tacklers, Dad saying, keep your knees up. He can’t play rugby anymore, or leap fences, or pop possums from trees with the .22.
Dad is still out, and I’ve finished the potatoes. I sit in the wardrobe and close the door to trap the darkness in. I’ve got a seat made out of stacked boxes with my winter jacket over the top. I imagine cutting the string and wrapping it around the arm tight like a Christmas ham. I imagine wrapping Dad’s cans of Double Brown, covering them all with string.
I imagine a world without birthdays or years. Instead we would count the days of our lives. We would celebrate milestones like your 3000th day alive. I might be 3000 today and no one would know and there’s no cake, no candles, it’s just another day. And I could remember days by their number, like the day dad found the dog-eared pornos Jack had stuck between my mattress and base. That could have been day 2732 or 2818 but I’ll never know. I could remember the day of the arm 2921 and the day of Jack’s accident 2925.
That night I hear them in the kitchen. Jack is in his room and it’s one of those nights I can’t stop my brain so I just lie there trying to be still and listening to the murmur of them arguing. Then when I get up and creep out slowly, the sounds become words.
“If we don’t have the money we don’t have the money, Tina,” Dad says.
“Well what would you suggest we do?”
“Just make the most of a bad situation. I’d rather spend the money on something that makes him happy.”
I just stand behind the door to the kitchen and a blade of light splits me in half, down my face, my torso to the ground.
“You could get some work, you know.”
“Who will clean and look after him, then?”
“Who will watch the soaps, you mean?”
Mum breaks, just a little huff of air and when she speaks, I know she’s crying.
“Don’t touch me,” she says.
“Alright, alright, I’m sorry.”
I wish I had told them about the arm, it was Jack who said we better not. He said we would get in trouble for playing in the drain.
The next day I’m walking home alone, I’m at the spot where the tar beneath my sandals is soft and pliable. The spot where we had seen the police car leaning up the road’s edge. I can almost see it now. There was yellow tape, bowed a little in the breeze. A man was sitting with his legs out of the open car door and a woman was pacing around the ditch with white gloves on.
When I got home, I put Rug Rats on to help me forget but some things don’t leave my brain, some things follow my thoughts getting louder and louder, and even when I scream they’re there. That’s the arm, that’s Jack’s accident, that’s the time Scott Reeves caught a wild cat and hung it by its back leg in a tree to shoot at with his slug gun, each shot a soft tap that rocked it, eventually it stopped mewling. Jack hadn’t seemed too worried, lying there watching it. I never forgot.
I take the string out and the scissors. I cut lengths to go around the basketball, threading it, pulling it this way and that until the ball is covered. Then I start on the shell that Uncle Bill brought back from Fiji. I wrap it once, tie a knot then wrap it again and tie another knot. Then I start the book that says Pocket Editions: Science.
I remember the day they found out. Dad came home and he didn’t take off his work clothes like usual, but went straight to the fridge and pulled out a Double Brown. Jack was on the four-wheeler, racing along in the paddock, maybe he knew they’d found out about the arm, maybe that’s why he was out there so long. I was making my cat’s cradles, doing them without looking, over and over, hovering near the sooty fireplace. Dad’s shoulders slumped forward, his head nodded over the Double Brown.
He said, “Did you hear about the arm?”
Mum said, “What?”
“Apparently someone’s found an arm, just off the road up near McGregor’s.”
“An arm?” Mum had said, her voice came over the knock-knock-knock the knife makes when she cut the carrots. She turned back, her nose screwed up. “What sort of arm?”
“A human arm. Grim, I know. They don’t know where it’s come from, washed down after the storm.”
Mum looked at Dad then jerked her head at me. “Oi,” he said, turning back. “Go watch TV.”
I didn’t think about where the arm came from, just that I was glad I didn’t have to tell them. They never found out that we were there, that we saw it. They didn’t even talk about it again. I guess they didn’t have time to think about it much after we had sat down for dinner and Dad looked up then said, “Hey, where’s Jack?”
After the summer break everyone is still talking about the arm but I can’t bring myself to tell the story of finding it with Jack. No one’s really talking about Jack at all, except Cody, who’s a year older, had said low and mean, your brother’s a retard now. I just kept walking by like I didn’t hear, squeezing the insides of my pockets in my fists. I don’t think it will matter to me soon because Dad’s saying we are going to go away. He’s saying we are going on a holiday. He’s saying we may even go to Disneyland. Just thinking about it now, it’s like I’m already there.
‘Days of Our Lives’ was first published in takahē 89 (April, 2017).
J.P grew up on a horse-racing farm in Rotorua with two brothers, a sister, two cats and two border collies. A first love for literary fiction quickly developed into a taste for sharp, fast paced story telling. Stories that surprised him, stories that tied a cold knot in the pit of his stomach. His work has been widely published in journals here and overseas, and he has won and been short-listed for a number of prizes.
J.P. has published three best selling novels, Call Me Evie, In the Clearing, and Tell Me Lies. His next novel The Last Guests will be released in 2021. J.P. currently lives in Australia.