Furious Horses

>The first thing I notice—even before I’m down the sealed roads, onto the highway, into the embrace of settlement—is the rainfall of insects on my windscreen beginning to ease. Engine noise and grinding gravel slowly replaces it, while outside a potted history of civilisation begins. The clay and the minerals rise up, with some encouragement, from the ground. The outside goes from the wet to the dry and back again more times than I can count, and spot fires herald a new form of steam. As my car keeps going straight, down the white-marked timeline, farms and fields move gradually through the Industrial Revolution; strange metal creatures begin to eye off cattle from beneath the warming sun, the landscape changes into blocks and the windmills of a kilometre ago have grown sturdy chests and piston legs that hum electricity’s tune. Then the flat sell of billboards, displaying better versions of the afternoon sky, brands to recognise and desire appearing as reminders of things we should have, or have already lost. Then I’m in the fringes—the outskirts—with the real products on display; the car dealerships and tile warehouses crowding together like a crammed mouth. Through it then, down the tar-sealed throat, towards the ripening high-rise lights beginning to trace shapes in the air. I’m in the bloodstream now, working my way towards the heart, rolling in with the fresh dust of history, to clog a city’s arteries.

>Gin’s mind sped at super-human speeds. He was thinking faster than anyone had ever thought before. He squinted up his eyes so the world rushed past—as he ran—in an arbitrary blur. He knew where everything was in the garden: he didn’t need to look. His bare feet barely touched the grass as he sped along, weaving, flash-like, around and under obstacles. The wind became the only reminder of where he was, buffeting his face, rippling the fabric of his costume.

This was his favourite part of being a super-hero. Normally, you had to think too much about everyday things—balance, safety, alertness—to keep you plodding along in a normal life, but when you were a superhero, your everyday senses were elevated, and you didn’t have to worry about mundane physical and mental functions. You were working on a higher level. It was great.
A multitude of worlds passed below Gin’s elevated gaze. First the garden, then the driveway, then the town, and then the ocean. He flew higher above the clouds. They spread out under him like a bumpy mattress: white and grey stitched with shadow. He dipped back through them, breaking sun-paths that let the sky in. Clear, clear blue.

Gin was bigger than the world he watched. He landed, and his arm found a tree to wrap around. He had returned to the backyard. The garden was vibrant. Colours pulsed. He rolled up his sleeves and took off his socks and walked around to the front of the house. He went behind the big lavender bushes and turned on the tap coming out of the wall. He heard the comforting chatter of the sprinkler beginning further down the driveway, on the left-hand lawn. He ran down the side of the drive, along the old railway sleepers. Under bare feet, they felt like the scales of an ancient serpent. He ran along the giant snake’s back, jumping off at the last minute to avoid its snapping jaws. He jumped joyfully under the waving arms of the sprinkler. Once he found its rhythm, he closed his eyes and began spinning against it. His eyelids sealed themselves like birthday presents. He tried his very best, as he spun, to forget where he was, to let the water ribbons graze him from every angle, to let the sun appear everywhere in the sky. This was the only way he could ever really think properly. When he found himself totally lost.

>Nearly grief. Like a tear that presses, burns, but won’t fall. Won’t even roll out, won’t even bud. A useless lack of expression, hiding in there like a taunting bully, too cowardly to emerge. A failed match-strike, a singe of sulfur, a deep dark gash to the senses.

>I woke up and my dinkus had corrupted. I guessed it had happened overnight, but really, with a dinkus, who knows? The man who had sold it to me had given me a good price, perhaps too good, looking back on it now. Sure, it had been second-hand, but the man had assured me that the previous owner hadn’t really used it all that much, and from looking at it, it certainly seemed to be nearly brand new.

But now it had corrupted, and I wished I had kept that instruction manual. It was a big phone book of a thing, and I thought, seriously, how hard can it be to operate a dinkus? Boy, I really needed some advice. A quick call to directory enquiries found me connected to what claimed to be a dinkus helpline, but after only talking to them for five minutes, it seemed they had no idea what a dinkus even was. Frustrated, I called my doctor, who luckily could fit me in over a cancelled appointment.

I turned up at the surgery in what I can only describe as a state of some stress. During the short trip to the surgery, my dinkus had re-corrupted, compounding the problems set off by the first corruption, and adding a rather worrying groaning noise. I burst into the surgery and the woman behind the counter, who knows me, immediately threw her hands over her eyes and screamed as if I were some kind of monster. She flung open the door to the doctor’s office without even a word.

Needless to say that I—at this point—was in more than considerable discomfort—my dinkus having corrupted not just once but twice, and the distinct possibility that the groaning noise meant a third corruption—and that simply holding together my thoughts well enough to talk to the doctor was taking a massive effort on my part.

The doctor, for his part, remained professional throughout the whole consultation (a consultation which had been made far more urgent by the receptionist’s screams into his intercom which had, I found out, preceding me into the room). The doctor, I knew, had been to war, and had seen things that no man should, but still his face took on a distinct tinge of green when I showed him my grossly over-corrupted dinkus. He put a hand to his face, and made a sound like muffled whale-song, but to his credit he still slipped on the rubber gloves, and gave my dinkus a full and rigorous inspection.

When he was done, he gestured that I should take a seat beside his desk. This was an offer I was all too ready to accept, except by this stage, I would not be able to do so without significant further damage to my dinkus. The doctor sat in his own chair, steepled his fingers, and gave me—in a deep, trembling voice—the sobering news that I would have to give up my dinkus, or risk its permanent and irrevocable damage.

With a lump in my throat, and a tear in my eye, I told the doctor to do whatever he thought was necessary. My health came first, I knew, but boy oh boy was I going to miss that dinkus.

>There’s a picnic bench, down by the river, just visible from my loungeroom window. Its occupants seem to swing between the two poles of my suburb: one day, a leg-stretching, Dri-Glo clad speedwalker; the next, an artistic, wistful water-starer. The one time I sat at the bench, my girlfriend and I ate home made burritos, swatted mosquitos and told each other rude jokes until the last of the day’s light leached out from the river’s ripples. I have never had the compulsion to walk down the hill and sit at the bench alone. In some alternate, perforated life, perhaps, I’d be there, writing, out in the open, among the feuding brush turkeys, watching the ferries stream past. Next to the picnic bench is an enormous tree, an eight-storey eucalypt, dwarfing the set of units to its left. It is up there, I realise, that I want to be, swaying in the perfect safety of nature’s great design. In amongst the green I am a hidden creature, creating, living.

>From up here, through this thick perspex view, people are reduced to their hair-part, their gait. Denied that extra dimension of the ground-walker, I sum people up from the crown of their head—a square foot, at most, of information. My screen is caked up with dust, water-spatter, the jewelled cracked backs of high-flying insects, but my clear view is still an unparalleled thing.

>For when all was said, and all was done—when our mouths were devoid of all words and our hearts of all proper feeling—we realised that what had happened was not so much a tragedy, in its richest sense, but more a “happening”: in the same way a cloud might suddenly take a familiar form, or a childhood song appear on a stranger’s lips.

We three remained on that cracked chalky stone, with the waves and sheer cliffs beneath us. On a ledge, below, just beyond farthest reach, sat a top hat, now separated from its owner by not only space but time.

>Two boxers fell deep in love
In the middle of a bout
Beneath a swift right
A tempered left
A catching eye
A quick pout
Jaw snap
XXO
KO

>What is left is half of a tree. Not a clean-shaven stump but a splintered crack: fibrous shafts of bark and woody sinew. A raw break, a painful break. LB stared at the broken tree for some while until The Grandpa came up to join her. Why? was what LB’s small, folded-up face seemed to say. The Grandpa put a big peanut finger up to the corner of LB’s eye, scooping up a tear before it had time to touch her cheek. —Just the way, it is, little sparrow— said The Grandpa. LB’s hands punched at little pockets of air. It’s unfair, her hands seemed to say. The Grandpa smiled. —Sometimes it’s just time— he said. —Sometimes it’s time that tells you to fall— .

>10 January 1973

Elsie has the morning off, and we walk down to Trewly Park. We sit on a bench by the dried-up pond, with its rusted sculpture sticking out of the water.

“You should come in with me today,” says Elsie. “Jamie’ll be up and talking by now.”

“He’ll be okay, won’t he?”

“I told you, he’s fine. His face won’t be straight for a while, but he’s fine.”

“I should probably start planning lessons,” I say. “Term’s only a few weeks away.”

Elsie twists her hands in her lap. She says, “He wants to see you, Sal. I think you should go.”

And I can see it’s killing her inside.

Jamie’s propped up on a pile of pillows. He’s pretty messed up. There are rows of stitches across his face, pushing up the skin into little mountain ranges.

“How’s it feeling?” I ask.

“All right,” he says. “Nothing compared to the hiding the old man’ll give me for missing work.”

I laugh a little and sit down beside the bed. He looks me in the eyes with a trace of Kenny’s squint.

“Jeez, I’m sorry Sal. For what happened. But the way they waltzed in there … It was so obvious, and I was so wound up by the whole – ” He stops mid–sentence. “Shit. I didn’t even ask – how’d it go?”

“One month and twelve hundred dollars.”

“Shit, Sal. Look, I’ll help you out with the money, you know I will.”

I look at him, helpless and fragile under the white sheets.

“You don’t owe me anything Jamie,” I say, tears stinging in my eyes. “You get your face smashed because of me and now you want to give me more. Everyone acts like it’s nothing … but it’s my fucking brother who has to pay for it and no can help, ’cause I’ve let him down. Not just him … ”

Jamie puts his hand on my arm. His palm is smooth and callused.

He says, “You haven’t told your mum, have you.”

I shake my head.

And I hate him. I hate Jamie right there. Not for saying the right things, but for meaning them. I don’t deserve someone so genuine. What I need is more fake emotion and hollow promises, something I can battle against. Please no more understanding. Please no more fucking help.

There’s another scene: mum by the phone, in the green Townsville heat, throwing back her steel-wool hair and artist’s eyes with her snide patronising calm. Saying, don’t worry about a thing. Meaning, I told you so.

6 February 1973

A month later, and my legs still stick to the car seat. I’m driving past the pub, with a storm building behind me, and a pile of finger paintings on the passenger seat. When I get home, Elsie and Jamie will be sitting on the verandah, talking and touching, my brother will be a thousand kilometres away, and I will wait patiently for the quiet death of another day.