Читать книгу The Styx - Patricia Holland - Страница 18

The stormbirds endlessly plead for the day to begin. It’s still and quiet. This is the time of day when I am most aware of being alone. I’m most scared at this time of the day. The stormbirds scream my fear, my silence.

No one else is awake and I’m hungry and wet and stinkin’. Believe me, no one’s in a hurry to wake up and face that. Everyone’s sick of having to change my stinkin’ nappies. Mum never worried, but. Every morning, she always jumped up and said, “Hey, Soph, let’s sort this stinkin’ nappy.” I love the word stinkin’.

Everyone’s sick of having to spoon-feed and clean up after me too. You can see it in their eyes. Hovering on the edge of the horror of imagining what it’s like to be me. Even good people hover on that edge of horror—good, bad, everyone hovers—no one really goes there. They may glimpse, but never visit waking up inside a dead person’s body, trying to move limbs you’re not really connected to, beating on the smeared Perspex willing someone to let you out. No one does. No one finds you. No one is looking.

Hours after I woke, before I saw anyone, I could hear voices. My father must have made the call. I didn’t hear the phone ring and believe me, I would have. Station phones have this ear-piercing phone projector bell ringing thing and it has no mercy.

“G’day, maayt, how goes it?”

On the other end of the phone, I could vaguely hear some bloke say my father’s name—or maybe I just inserted the usual sub-text. No introduction necessary.

“Yes, it’s me, how did you know?” My father always says that.

He’s always surprised when people recognise his phone-bellow. The bellow is honed from when the phone lines were very dodgy party-lines. He learnt to phone-talk over the crackle and lots of other background voices. My father likes to make sure he’s heard.

“There’s about two hundred and fifty empty greys, and a hundred and fifty pregnant. … No, no brindles, just a hint of gold on some. … Yep, all white tails, no white faces. What are they paying? … Mmmm, they’ll need to do a bit better than that. No point in keeping them in the yard for that. … Let me know if they come to the party. If I don’t hear from you by smoko, I’ll open the gate.”

Stomp, stomp, stomp to the kitchen to make coffee. If he hears Sharon, “the nanny”, banging around, he’ll yell to her, “How about a cuppa, darl.” It is never a question. And there is rarely an answer. Sharon bangs a few cupboards, then stomp, stomp, stomps out to the verandah with his coffee.

“Have you got Soph up yet?” He has asked her that every single day of her existence at The Styx. “She’ll need changing, and breakfast.” He says it as if they go together like tea and scones, bread and butter, surf and sand.

There’s a newsreel of the world I see and hear in my head. I watch and record everyone out there having a good time, having a bad time, wasting their options, talking about me, arguing over who has to “look after” me, planning things that scare me. I am alone, waiting for others to do what they want to me, to this discounted mind and rotting carcass of a body. I’ve not been allowed to completely rot away, but it is very clear to me that it is not necessary to have depression to crave death.