Where We Are Now

by Jesse Morris

The car jerks to a halt and rattles with a warning. It clearly wants nothing to do with moving again. I look to my sister in the passenger seat alone beside me. I may have stopped the car but is this little girl any safer now? Dad said a Volvo was the best decision a family could make and I believed him. The safety of a family car is paramount when your dad’s an alcoholic.

He didn’t know that I knew, or that I even knew what an alcoholic was for that matter. He certainly never volunteered an explanation. Mum had told me once a long time ago, when she was sitting at the end of my bed: the position she took when she had something very difficult to explain to me. I simply thought I was in trouble: it took me a while to understand that it wasn’t me she was angry with. She sat there, perfectly still besides the panting, just staring out through our painting. It was a picture of a window opening to an impossibly perfect day. There were kites, but not those looming doom stunt kites, not the ones that duck and weave and you just watch unable to move waiting for someone to be garroted - they were the nice kind of Kite. The one’s that just sit in the sky, satisfied with a bit of fresh air and they are so happy they simply refuse to budge an inch. There were balloons and children in summer clothes chasing deer and ripe berries growing everywhere. A bit over the top (unrealistic some may say, a lion wouldn’t play with an antelope quite like that) - I know - Mum had painted it for me years ago when I rarely had a room with a window. That night I had a real window in my room, but we’d got in the habit of staring out of this one. The curtain on my actual window was shut, the only thing behind it a brick wall. I’d asked her if we could paint the garden on the wall outside the real window. She said it wasn’t up to her, but she’d ask for me. It turned out we weren’t allowed to.

Skip doesn’t look ready to get out of the car yet so I just wind down the window to ease us into it, tempt her with some fresh country air. She stares straight ahead so that’s what I do too. If she doesn’t want to look in my eyes I’m not going to let her look. That’s the parental psychology I’ve got. Just don’t look back Skip. The floor in the back of the car had partially collapsed when Skip was helping me put grandpa’s old clock in behind the driver’s seat, ready to take it home to the farm. Her little nine-year-old arms had struggled with the weight, but she was tough when compared to the car. The crusted floor caused little hesitation in the clocks descent. Now, outside Granddad’s old place, the tall grass was already creeping into the car through the floor and brushed mockingly against our under-thought itinerary. I wrapped around the drivers seat and look into the back of the car to the summary of our combined worldly goods. Dad’s old clock formed the structural framework of our collection, jammed between the back seat and the drivers, hovering above the gaping chasm and wedged in with a delicate angle against the roof and window seal. Skip said it was a dangerous angle, but I had a word with her and we agreed to call it a delicate angle from now on. I could tell I was going to have to be careful with Skip. It was the semantics of how you described our situation that defined our possibility of salvation. Someone operating on pure reason alone could never understand how I hoped to pull this whole thing off.

Around the clock the car held little else; most of the things thrown in there just to make the collection seem more official, or at least more considered. Some garbage bags were filled with clothes, some pots and books; some things to help get us started. Many were just full of garbage. I do not say ‘garbage’ in a sarky sentimental ‘that old garbage, the memorial of my youth’ kind of way. The bags are quite literally full of household trash. The bags filled out the car and were labeled as skips school things. They were packed carefully, a fragile balance was achieved to ensure that the bags outlines suggested textbooks and clothes and that these outlines remained only suggestions, and did not tear to reveal their actual contents - mostly pizza boxes and newspapers. It all looked so official that even I was foolishly impressed. It was easy to create the illusion: I had a lot of stuff to throw out. My installation art piece was such a success the social worker actually believed that I was prepared for this and we were cleared for take-off.

It’s been three days together on the road. I felt just like dad stopping at motels. Now we are actually here and I flick the keys from the ignition. It could take me awhile before I get any more gas in Dad’s old pride the way it is at the moment. It’s going to be a race against the weeds to see who keeps the car. I take the safety lock off and look up at Skip. She’s still got her seat belt on and she’s not too keen on moving either.

“Is this it?” She’s asking about the new home in front of us, the farm the Dad she never met grew up on, but she’s just staring into her own little lap.

“Come on Kipper.” I’m about to go into a look on the bright side speech like I’m mum as I grab her masters of the universe bag from the back seat and sling it over my shoulder, like I’m dropping her off at school even though she doesn’t want to go, but I know what’s best for her. I can’t say it though. What do I say? Come on Kipper, trust your brother you barely know who’s brought you 1200 kilometres away from everyone and thing you know. Forgive him, he was entertaining on the trip, singing along to the Rolling Stones at the top of his lungs, changing the lyrics slightly in a contextually appropriate-clever-but-still-upbeat-and-down-to-earth kind of way, singing Wild Wild Horsies. At first when it came on the radio as a completely spontaneous hilarious type thing, then again on the other station in a coincidental joking way that subtly makes suggestions to a sense of the whole world just spinning in tiny circles around us in the car. Skip and her older brother, a tiny significant joke that made a nod to our own importance, our own unique moment at the centre of the universe.

Then I sang it again, one more time when I found the tape after I figured out how to open Dads tape chest, when we were at the rest stop 700km down the road, but this time in a I know’s I’m taking this too far kind of way, Skip thinking he’s not gonna sing it again, though I do, just one more hook, but not again, that would be too much. I make my point that she should listen to Jagger. He’s a passionate, wise/foolish man and there’s just not enough of them these days. Well there’s a lot of them actually, but you tend to hear too much of the wrong ones. So even though your brother did all this on the way, even though he can’t really sing and he knows it but still hopes, he’s still taken you 1200 kilometres away from your only friends so he can get away from his own troubles. Trust him, he’s doing this for you. Everyone’s dead Skip, it’s just us. Be a Sport, Skip. We’ve driven past every destination that could have looked exciting and ended up here, in a dustbin. Here I am with my little sister, her only family left, and I just learnt her favourite colour 1200 kilometres ago. What on earth am I doing? Come on Kipper. Be a sport.

Before Skip was born, Dad used to move us around a lot. We’d follow his glossy sales pitch door to door across every motel in the country. The way Dad talked when we got somewhere new he could make a dingy room seem like a place to raise a family. He’d talk about all the things we would do to make the place shine, and he would assure us that we would do them this time and somehow he caught the light from all the right angles in his words, and we believed him time and again. I don’t understand how we kept believing him. Mum was always exhausted. We never stayed in one place long enough to make buying a vacuum cleaner worth the damn. I left as soon as I realised I could. Dad showed me the way, really. It makes you think you can walk away from anything when you watch your father leave your pregnant mother.

“Look how big the garden is Skip, you ain’t never seen a garden so big.” I say to her, and I notice that I’ve slipped into a light Mary Poppins imitation and I feel like a jerk. I need to update Mary Poppins for the twenty-first century, I must give her a new image so she can resonate with the symbols of today, with Skips youth culture, and I can’t even remember how that film ended. She left didn’t she? Everybody leaves. What a depressing film. “That ain’t no garden.” She was right. It was a few Acres of weeds that were lucky to be growing in the soil they had with a weathered old ghost house in the middle looking like it hadn’t been built there, it had just fallen there and felt it too.

This old farm we’re standing in front of was where Dad said we were going to be happy, not that Skip would know. It’s where we were gonna be raised proper, somewhere with friends who knew where we lived and a shop we knew the clerk at, even though he wasn’t wearing a nametag. Jimmie, or Oscar, somebody with a catchy name and attitude worked there. Something you could call out in a quirky voice in the company of strangers, (not that you would be in the company of strangers in a town like this) and when you bought the paper off Jimmy or Oscar or Ziggy, it didn’t matter what was happening, because you and Jimmie (or Oscar or Ziggy) understood, in an unspoken way, everything that could ever happen. Dad and I had put together a few rough characters but had yet to finalize casting on the town we’d call home one day. Sometimes dad would tell me what the guys were up to, these people we had invented: our neighbours - and he’d tell me about how much they were missing us and couldn’t wait till we got there. These were the stories I was told in the back of the car on the way to the next stop, every time. All that was gonna happen when Dad had made his break of course. He was always quite secretive about the nature of the break. He didn’t know what it was but he knew it was coming. It was just the break. Being a kid I simply wouldn’t understand, and again he never volunteered an explanation.

I went back home when Mum got sick. I stayed for the last year. It was hard being around her, spitting out green cancer phlegm into a little dish beside her on the couch. She stayed on that couch so long and I kept trying to convince myself it was the couch that was getting bigger. We went to stay with Aunt May after she died. Well, Skip stayed. I went to the big city and stole anything I could for rent. Started selling speed for a few years, but I was too lonely to stay safe and I got rolled. Now I’m here, pretending I’m dad. And I sound exactly the same as him, acting like this bleak farm is a renovators dream. But I’m not the same. I can’t let that happen. That’s what happens when don’t make something happen. The exact opposite happens to happen. My point is, you can’t escape inevitably making something happen.

“We’re gonna plant all the right pretty things in this garden Skip, they’ll grow fine if we treat em right.” I start telling Skip about all the flowers we gonna plant, and I tell her all the names: Lilly’s, Roses, Buttercups and Lavender, all the ones I know. I tell her I’m sure there are others I can’t remember. There’s gonna be Potatoes too, Strawberries and all those things.
Skip’s being real quiet. I wished she would pipe up and get excited, get involved and help me think of more farm food and make my whole dreamscape sound more convincing. Maybe she’s smart enough to suspect me. She might not be old enough in some people’s books but she’s sure seen enough. She can see through me in a second. She’s just kind enough not to say anything about it.

“You can play in the garden so long an’ never get called in for tea,” I tell her, “cause it’s all out here. We can have Easter hunts for our food every day.” All out here on grandpas deserted old farm in the weeds and dust and I feel just like dad must have when he knew it was a lie.
“We don’t know nothin’ bout gardenin Jobe.” As I’m thinking it she’s saying it, but I can’t afford to think like that. Maybe if I don’t think it, I won’t project it on her, and she won’t have to go and say something to spoil the mood I’m working so hard to create here. “Nothing we ain’t gonna find out soon enough Skip.” Good. Positive. Sounds achievable, without putting too much pressure on her, or me. I’m not setting her up for a fall, am I? You don’t want to strangle them.

Sal, grandad’s survivor, the guy whose idea this all was, whose fault this all is, said on the phone he had the power in the house working for us so we head straight in. I still haven’t met Sal face to face, so you’ll have to wait for a proper description of him. Right now I picture him as Ebenezer Scrooge, but from the very end of a Christmas Carol, the Scrooge who knew love for everyone all too well. As we walked across the overgrown path Skip kept her head down, her little ash fringe swayed in front of her, shielding her eyes from whatever was ahead. She wasn’t very happy with me and wanted me to know it. It suits me for now. I don’t want Skip to see the yard properly just yet and as long as she’s grumpy she’ll keep her head down. I can’t see much in the darkness myself now and there isn’t much motivation to look. I’m trying to convince Skip that I’m excited to be here but it’s proving extremely difficult when I’m keeping my head down to avoid seeing what a shit hole I’ve just imprisoned us in.

In the house Sal’s left us some milk in the fridge and a note to come see him in the morning. He lives just downstream the creek about twenty miles, so follow it along, good walk it is and all. The river flows slowly so you don’t need to rush. I want to drive but there’s no gas. Sal seems real good. He was a friend of grandpa’s since they were boys smoking in the alleyways. He’s getting too old now to run his farm lately, and I think he’s been solitary since he’s outlived everyone, and here I am to save the day, with sidekick in tow. Out of nowhere. Looking to be saved myself.

“How long are we going to be here Joe?” I realize that I have no idea how to answer her. I’m talking to myself. We’re going to grow our own food Skip. We are going to learn how to do it. We have a place to do it now. Come on Kipper. Be a Sport.