Isabelle the Navigator Read online

  Tom told funny stories from his med school class, his voice dry and laconic as he did the character impersonations, Tess and Dan and Elaine rolling about laughing.

  It came as a surprise to my mother, Tess Carter, that falling in love could happen so smoothly and easily.

  The fragments that she knew about her mother and father—the dress shop in Newcastle, the handsome John Carter in uniform and off to war—didn’t lend themselves easily to the notion of falling in love, that sensation of gliding and irreversible momentum, that fall from a height, when all things change. Perhaps there were many missing pieces in Constance’s story. Perhaps there had been passion in the heart of that seventeen-year-old girl. But it was all so long ago—the Second World War—and it was hard for Tess to imagine Constance as anything other than her bitter mother, a core sucked of juice and spat out by life, prematurely grey in body and spirit.

  The most my mother could imagine was that a courtship had occurred. Courtship was the word that worked. John Carter courted Constance Hapgood in his breaks from the war, on leave. People in the war didn’t fall in love. But in 1965 the world was different and Tess Carter was falling in love with Tom Airly. In 1965 the world was new and clean. Love, too, was a modern thing.

  The love affair drifted onwards through the sweet-smelling seasons. In 1966 Tom proposed, and with heart overflowing, Tess said yes. Yes I will take my due. Yes we will grow young forever. In 1968, after Tom’s first full year as an intern, they married. Emerging from the vestibule of the Immaculate Conception Church, Tess saw the grains of rice and the blossoms rain down in slow motion from out of a cloudless sky as if the sumptuousness of all love and life were compressed into those seeds and flowers arcing gracefully to earth.

  To prove it, I was born in 1969.

  Meat Truck

  LOOK, A DRAGONFLY!’

  ‘Dragonfly?’

  I pointed to the insect on the inside of the windshield.

  ‘That’s a ladybird, darling. A lady beetle.’

  ‘Oh.’

  We drove through the afternoon traffic. I watched the bug’s progress across the glass.

  ‘You know, once upon a time—this is a long, long time ago—all the animals were very big. Even the insects, like this one.’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘Maybe… I think there were dragonflies as big as this van. There were beetles as big as Volkswagens. See that Volkswagen there? That’s called a Beetle. They named it after beetles just like this lady beetle. Only bigger.’

  ‘Was this before I was born, Uncle Dan?’

  ‘Sweetheart, it was even before I was born. I guess this was the time of the dinosaurs.’

  He is still a mystery to me. It’s all a mystery. And yet I loved him almost as much as my father. When I was young Tom spent many years building up his surgery, a small suburban practice, and though we passed long hours together in the evenings, at times in my growing-up I was more familiar with Uncle Dan’s company. This was due not so much to the amount of time we spent together—it was not, in actual fact, a great deal—but to the intense pleasure I gained from exploring the world from the cabin of the meat truck. On certain days, when I was four or five years old, in the years before school began, Uncle Dan would take me with him on the meat run.

  On such days I felt special; the air would glow with possibility, the frenzy of traffic promised new adventures. Our conversations rambled everywhere. Since parents are merely everything, Dan was like the first separate adult I ever knew.

  ‘Uncle Dan?’

  ‘Sweetie?’

  ‘When I grow up I’m going to buy an island and make it my own country, and there’ll only be three laws.’

  ‘Your own country. That sounds terrific.’

  ‘Do you want to know the laws?’

  ‘Tell me the laws.’

  ‘Firstly, everybody has to dance.’

  ‘I’d be into that! What, dance all the time?’

  ‘No, of course not. But every day, at least. At least one time. Secondly, the killing of animals. If you kill an animal you have to do five days’ work in the animal hospital.’

  ‘That sounds okay. What’s the third law?’

  ‘Um, no cutting of trees. If you cut down a tree you have to plant a new one.’

  ‘Sounds like a beautiful place to me. Does it have a name?’

  ‘It’s called Marine Island. And the people are called Marinelles.’

  ‘And you’ll be the queen.’

  ‘No, there’s no need for a queen, silly. I’ll just be one of the people who live there.’

  ‘Can I live there?’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘Okay. Well, we’d better make this a fruit and vegetable truck, then.’

  ‘And in the backyard I’ll have a rabbit.’

  Whereas my dad kept the family car clean, vacuumed it at least every other weekend, and regularly replaced the plastic deodoriser adhered to the dash, Uncle Dan’s meat van seemed to me a fundamental thing of earthiness. No effort was ever made to clean the cabin, which had become a repository for all the small things that passed through Dan’s working life, accreting layers in an archaeological fashion: empty biros, chip wrappers, petrol receipts, soft drink cans, blinker-light fuses, coins, crushed matchboxes. The cabin smelt of engine grease and hamburgers, though the dominant odour was what emanated from the cavernous refrigerated van itself: the raw sweet smell of carcass blood and sawdust.

  In the rubble behind the driver’s seat Uncle Dan kept three old phone books. I would sit on these and he would clip me into my seat belt and the day would be mine, like a movie, an exciting melee of traffic and colour and diesel fumes.

  I loved the moment when Dan pulled up to make a delivery. Sometimes I would stay in the cabin while he went around the back to unlatch the van door. I would feel the slight rocking of the truck as he hoisted himself up among the sides of cows and the pigs hanging headless and hoof-less and hairless on their stainless-steel hooks. I would lean forward and peer into the side mirror. Then the truck would bounce again and Dan would appear in my view, bent over as he carried the carcass across the footpath and into the butcher’s.

  He always hoisted the carcasses onto his left shoulder, and I loved too the bizarre asymmetry of his white meat-coat, the right side always approximating white, the left side smeared with abstract patterns of red, like the smocks we wore to painting in the preschool group.

  Sometimes towards the end of the day, when the truck was getting empty, Dan would ease up to the kerb, pull on the handbrake, turn to me and say, ‘You can get out here, darl. We’ll have a chat to Barry the Brick.’ The old Erskineville butcher was a solid giant rectangle six-feet high by four-feet wide, and as red in complexion as a house brick. Dan would unclasp my seat belt and I’d lower myself from the phone books to the floor of the cabin, waiting for him to come around to the passenger side. He’d open the door and I’d dive, as if he were a swimming pool, into his arms. It was a game in which I always tried to catch him off-guard, and he always staggered backwards under my weight, saying, ‘Whoa! Almost lost you!’ He lowered me to the ground and I’d run to the back of the van. Dan would unlatch the doors and swing them open, press the button that lowered the hydraulic platform. Holding hands, we’d step onto the platform. Dan would look down, grinning at me. ‘First floor: children’s toys, ladies’ haberdashery, grey socks, beach balls, perfume.’ It was different nonsense every time, and I would giggle, just a little, because I knew the best was to come.

  Dan would press the button. The platform shuddered and rose up to the level of the van. He remained poker-faced, in character. ‘Second floor.’ He would peer into the refrigerated darkness and do a double-take. ‘Goodness gracious me. Second floor: dead pigs, dead cows, and buckets of blood.’

  And I would holler and laugh and run into the gloom, slapping my open palm against the haunches of the pigs, whose skin was so stretched, pale and young, and who I never related to the happy animals of Marine Island
. Standing in the semi-darkness among the swaying carcasses, I looked out through the open door to the bright hot shops and streets, the people walking on the footpaths like characters in a dream. It was delicious to bathe in the knowledge that I could see them but they couldn’t see me.

  When the last carcass had found its way into Barry the Brick’s coolroom, Barry and Dan would often come out to lean against the truck and open a couple of cans of beer while Mrs Barry the Brick looked after the shop. I would sit on the patterned metal of the hydraulic platform, dangling my feet over the edge and swinging them lazily backwards and forwards. I felt that my presence on the platform spelt out to the passers-by a kind of proprietorship. The truck was mine—the business, too, of course—but more than that: the strangeness of it all was mine. I knew somehow that a meat van, so full of life so recently raw, was not the same as a bread van or milk van. It was in that league of otherness, along with, say, firetrucks or flower vans. The world of special things that glowed.

  Occasionally, on a Friday, Uncle Dan and Barry the Brick would have more than one beer. The first can was always drunk quite quickly. But at the cracking open of the second can, I knew that I had a little time to go off exploring around the back alleys behind the shop. With the second can the day seemed to slow down, and I could sense the almost imperceptible relaxing of muscles in Uncle Dan and the Brick, the mild onset of serenity that came with the approach of the weekend and the first warmth from the first beers of Friday evening.

  ‘Uncle Dan,’ I’d say, ‘can I go out the back?’

  And Barry the Brick would reply, ‘You go through there, love, and ask the missus to let you out through the packing room.’

  I would glide into the shop, which smelt just like the truck but was less cold. Mrs Barry the Brick kept behind the counter a supply of lollipops, and would always try to delay me while she rummaged through the drawer looking for one. ‘That’s right, little one. Come inside from the sun. And are we having a nice day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ve been driving with Uncle Dan, have we?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wait a minute there, I’ve got something for you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘There. Do you want me to take the wrapper off for you?’

  ‘No, I’ll keep it. Thank you.’

  I would clench the lollipop in my fist and imagine the slow release of sugar, later, in the truck, with the low sun flooding the cabin and illuminating every crack and fissure on the windscreen. We’d stand for a moment, the butcher’s wife with her hands pressed together, myself staring at her apron.

  ‘You’re such a beautiful little thing, aren’t you?’

  ‘Can I go out there now?’ I would ask, pointing out through the back door.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Mrs Brick would say. ‘Off you go, now.’

  The backyard of the shop seemed to stretch forever. It was a place so full of junk that it offered unlimited opportunity for exploration. Above all, it was a place of exquisite privacy. The butcher shop was like a barrier, on the other side of which lay the world, which meant sunlight, and adults, like Uncle Dan. Uncle Dan meant the truck, and the truck meant the way home, and the world flowed on from there, Tom and Tess and everything that was familiar. But here in the backyard of Barry the Brick’s, things had no purpose, and I imagined that everything just sat there, untouched, unvisited, day after day and all night too, for the long stretches of time between my visits. In the Bricks’ backyard I came to feel, for the first time, that heart-fatiguing sadness that has nothing to do with events concerning the self but comes from the objects that surround us.

  There were old car bodies to enter. There were stacks of wood and rusty lathes, a shed, a doorless refrigerator on its side. There were concrete pipes just wide enough to slither through.

  I was the caretaker of this world. Everything was machinery. It was a world of complex forms.

  Shopping with my mother in the supermarket once I’d seen a man in a long white coat, like Uncle Dan’s but clean. He was moving slowly down the aisle and making ticks and numbers on a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard. I’d watched him for a while, watched the way his total absorption seemed to isolate him from all other activity. It seemed to me that his job was important.

  And that’s what I did in the backyard: check things, tick things off. I did the rounds, talking to myself as I moved through the yard, imaginary clipboard in hand. Counting the beams of wood. ‘One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Seven. Eleven. Twenty-six. Nineteen. Okay. That’s nineteen.’ Pressing all the buttons and knobs on the old car dashboard, in sequence, because it had to be that way. Crawling through the pipes and stopping halfway, resting on my back to inspect the cracks close above me. Imagining the whole yard alive with whirring and clicking, a functioning entity made workable and possible by me. An entity that craved my presence in all the weeks that I was away.

  There was the cat, too, which I had seen several times but never actually touched. It kept its distance with a wary affection, always purring, as if wanting to come near, meowing incessantly but then moving away. I liked to think that the cat was in charge of things when I wasn’t there.

  One winter day when the yard seemed dark and sombre, I was checking all the meters and gauges. The sky hung heavy and added to the yard’s greyness. On other days more summery than this the blueness of the sky offset the brittleness of the yard, and it only took a single bird, unseen, to sing, for my mouth to split for smiling. On this day I moved automatically through my tasks and was beginning to think of going back out into the street, where Uncle Dan and Barry the Brick would be, in the normal world. I swung open the rusty door of the shed and moved into the darkness. I stood still, waiting for my eyes to adjust. I ran my fingers over the repeating contours of a stack of red terracotta roof tiles. Then I imagined spiders living in the crevices and pulled my hand away. The shed was boring. I went back outside.

  In the far corner of the yard was a pile of old tyres that I had never fully investigated. It was an organic rather than an angular thing and so seemed out of place in the butcher’s junkyard. I had thought of climbing the little hill of rubber once or twice but it was peppered with the gaps between tyres and the holes in the tyres themselves, spaces that led into the unknowable insides of the mound. I imagined dark and crawling things in there. It had always been easier to be Isabelle the Inspector, and to look after the factory than to go near this place of shifting spaces.

  My eyes made one final sweep around the yard and a flash of movement caught my attention and brought my gaze to rest on the rotting wooden back gate at the furthest edge of the yard. The tufts of grass that grew around it showed that the gate had not been opened in many years. There was the cat, the uncatchable cat, a scruffy tortoiseshell, squeezing itself through a gap in the gate and landing silently in the rubble and weed.

  It looked at me and meowed faintly, moved straight to the tyres and climbed to a jutting ledge that formed halfway up. I squatted and extended my arm, as if I held food. ‘Puss, puss puss!’

  The cat stopped and turned its head towards me. Then it turned away and slithered through a gap in the tyres and disappeared. A second later I heard a tiny chorus of squeals, like the faintest of sounds carried on the wind from miles away.

  I knew at once that a new thing had unfolded in the yard, and I hoped now that Uncle Dan and Barry the Brick would drink many more beers, that their drinking and chatting would stretch on into the evening; that they’d forget about me for a while. A special event had arisen in my life. I moved gingerly to the hole where the cat had disappeared. I placed one leg on the lowest tyre and leaned forward, balancing my hands on the higher tyres and craning my head to peer in.

  The cat, reclining, looked out at me and meowed again. Nestled into its wide soft belly were five or six kittens, the tiniest kittens I had ever seen. Perhaps I had never seen any until now; the moment lodges in my memory as a kind of epiphany. They moved continuously, pushing forward on
their little twig legs, massaging around their mother’s distended nipples in a rhythmic pulse. I reached my hand in and allowed the cat to smell my fingertips. I gently began to stroke its flanks, brushing my hand over the mound of kittens. I moved my hand beneath the belly of the kitten closest to its mother’s head and detached it from the nipple it so furiously sucked. Its lungs emptied all of their air: a squeak no louder than the pips of a telephone could be heard.

  I moved the kitten to its mother’s purring mouth. The cat licked the flailing bundle of fluff; calmed, the kitten allowed itself to be buffeted by her tongue. Slowly I extracted my arm from the tyre cave. The mother cat made only a weak meow.

  I held the blind black kitten to my nose. Bewildered by this new thing, the overwhelming breath of a four-year-old girl, its head moved in short sharp swings. I cupped it in my hands and rubbed it over my face, cooing and shushing as it continued its belligerent squeals. I cradled it in my lap, in the folds of my dress, and wanted the moment to last forever.

  I ran back through the yard and met, at the back door, Uncle Dan coming through to collect me.

  ‘Look Uncle Dan!’

  ‘What is it, Bumble Bee?’

  ‘It’s a kitten! Can I keep it?’

  ‘Where’d you find it?’

  ‘Over there, in that pile.’

  We walked across and Dan peered in. ‘Brand new,’ he said. ‘Brand spanking new, they are. You used to be that big, you know?’

  I crinkled my nose. ‘I did not. That’s stupid!’

  ‘Hey,’ he said gently, taking the kitten from me and placing it back on the purring mother’s nipple, ‘they can’t be away for too long just yet.’

  ‘Can I keep it, Uncle Dan?’

  ‘We’ll have to talk to your mother about that. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. But even if she says yes, we can’t take it straight away: it has to stay with its mother for a while longer first.’

  After the longest few weeks of my life, Truly (as in ‘Truly Scrumptious’) came to be the Airly family cat. My cat. From his humble beginnings in Barry the Brick’s old tyre pile, Truly became for the next thirteen years—he would die the same week Dad was arrested—the serene centre around which streamed the pandemonium of Airly life, the fortunes and misfortunes and the flow of time. And I became—at least for the next five years or so—Chief Cat Choreographer, dressing Truly in an endless array of bonnets and scarves and Tshirts, and moving his reluctant limbs to the latest Abba song, or to ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ by Elton John and Kiki Dee, or ‘Staying Alive’ by the Bee Gees.