The Eye of the Sheep Read online

  He looked at me. ‘Climb in,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s see if you can stand.’

  I knew I couldn’t stand because when I was on the outside of the drum it was much taller than me. I stepped onto the crate and I pulled myself up. Liam helped me. The water was cold on my legs when I swung them over.

  ‘Lower, come on,’ said Liam. ‘Go lower – hold on to the sides.’ He watched as I went lower.

  When I was all the way in I held on to the sides with my fingers. I looked up into the sky and I saw that it was made of water, as if the sky had turned to sea, and it was falling in my eyes.

  Liam banged at my fingers with the stick where they gripped the edge of the drum. ‘Let go, Aqua Boy! Let go!’ he said.

  I moved my hand away and gripped on with the other but then he hit that too.

  Whack! ‘Let go, Aqua Boy!’ Whack!

  I kept changing hands and kicking with my legs and the rain was beneath me at the same time as it was over me.

  I felt Liam’s hand on the top of my head push me under as if I was the cat and it was me who kept coming back, me drinking Anne White’s milk, me nobody wanted. I went under then I struggled and his hand came off for a second and I grabbed at the air but I couldn’t get it in. My passages filled with water; I coughed and gulped and more water came in. I could hear something roar, like a shout, but it wasn’t from outside of me, it was from somewhere deep in my own network.

  When I came up again I saw Liam’s face and all the features were sharp and serious, every cell and fibre working hard towards the one thing as if there was no other thing more important than this. He had decided.

  I came up for air only to give him something to push against. Then I was under and I couldn’t feel the sides of the drum anymore; there was nothing to hold. Every part of me hurt; my chest, my eyes, my throat, my back, my ribs, my face and stomach, legs and arms were all bursting with the pressure of the water filling every space.

  I saw my mother, her body a bridge in the bed as she arched. I saw her mouth open, fighting for air, as if she’d always been at war, the battle keeping her starving no matter how much she ate. Now we were in the same fight. Tighter and tighter and hotter and hotter, my mother before me, her eyes rolled back as she fought, and then suddenly nothing hurt at all. The fight was finished. Everywhere was quiet and soft, and in the darkness of the barrel I saw particles of the light that burned in the eye of the sheep.

  The tiny lights drifted like dust, bouncing from my fingertips when I reached out to touch them. The sides of the drum disappeared as the water spread; there were no sides, everywhere was soft and soundless. The water was a cool safe home around me. I surrendered to the floating world: all of my parts underneath, my root and the hole left behind, my cells, all drifted in the light from the eye of the sheep.

  Part Five

  And then I heard shouting and calling, and I was in the mud on the hard ground, no longer drifting or weightless, and there was a face over mine, covering my mouth, blowing air deep into my passages. I struggled against it but there were no limits to its force. The air knew what it wanted and where it wanted to be and it kept coming and coming, insistent, sure, as if in the final seconds it had made up its mind. It was Liam breathing life back inside me.

  I coughed and coughed and when I opened my eyes Liam was shaking my shoulders, and his face was white. ‘Jimmy! Jimmy!’ he cried loudly. It was full of sound and breath, like choking.

  But it was too late. My epidermis was here but all my living inners were in the light. I closed my eyes and found myself drifting again. Somewhere there was shouting and calling. Was it Jake? I heard a siren; the same one that called for my mother was coming for me. I was joining her. My skin was shaken, there was a mask over my face. I let it. I let it all. There was no one and nothing to fight; the fight was finished. I breathed and it both hurt and it didn’t. I was observational only.

  My body was put in the bed. Liam was still crying. It was a music trying to enter, but I was impenetrating. The instruments of it went on and on. Jake shouted, ‘What the hell happened?’ but there was no answer, only the music of Liam’s crying, then Deirdre’s. It linked with his and took over. She stood at a door then the door was closed and I was alone, then I closed my eyes and I was in the light again. It was there for me. The waves of my brain had discovered it in the barrel. There was no time anymore.

  Then Uncle Rodney was at the house. His face floated into vision; he said, Hang in there, hang in there, Jimmy. His touch was made of glass. Didn’t he know – all change was only change on the way to the same place? The only place for me was in the water, in the light, with my mum where I had begun and where I ended.

  Jan Watts was there and I went with her and Uncle Rodney to the hospital and a man said, Don’t move, don’t move, as I slid into the tunnel and I didn’t move, I was never going to. Another man took my blood and I watched it shoot into the bottle and the way it rushed was a surprise, as if there was still life. A man came close with a torch and his words were no evidence of injury just in time I’d say. Injury was when something took a bruise and the blood turned hard so it couldn’t pass on the nutrients. It stuck under the skin and turned a person into an immovable.

  I didn’t see Anne White anymore. Just before Jake pushed Liam into the car, Liam said to me, ‘I wasn’t going to let you drown,’ then he started to cry. Deirdre was saying, Jimmy, Jimmy. I couldn’t speak. She threw herself against me. ‘I love you, Jimmy,’ she said, then she stuck Melanie into the pocket of the red suitcase. Uncle Rodney drove us to the airport and he led me into the body of the plane and put me in a seat and a lady said do you want a drink before she found out I was inanimate.

  There was the sound of lifting, the roar of the engine, the turn of the blades through the sky. I drifted. I never left the light for a single second. I could be in it eyes open or closed.

  The plane headed down and there was no difference between take-off and landing. They were the same. Uncle Rodney said, ‘Jimmy, we’ve got to get you home,’ and he got me home and Ned came to me. He whimpered and put his heavy paws on my shoulders but my eyes couldn’t look. They lifted above.

  Uncle Rodney said, ‘Your father is coming, Jim. He called me after you went to see him. He’s coming, Jim. I didn’t want to tell you until I was sure. But he called again. He is coming.’

  Uncle Rodney kept checking the clock and his watch and getting up and looking out his window and then sitting down, then getting up again. There was a knock at the door.

  Uncle Rodney jumped up and pulled open the door and it was my dad. He crossed the room towards me; he didn’t know I had left the living beings. The television was on. There were men chasing each other through the streets, their ties flapping back over their shoulders. My dad was in the room. I wasn’t joined. My eyes stayed on the screen as the men kept running. When they got to a building or a wall they jumped right over the top.

  My dad said, ‘Oh God, Jimmy.’ And he put his arms around me. I couldn’t feel their pressure. He began to rock me back and forth, his arms tight around me. I was like a silkworm in a cocoon. I couldn’t be reached. He kept rocking. Again he said, ‘Oh God, Jimmy,’ and his warm breath in the shape of my name entered my ear. Again, ‘Jimmy,’ he said. And he kept rocking and I felt his heat. He kept rocking and I could feel him pushing past the barrier of my skin. I didn’t want it. I screamed. My dad didn’t let go. He kept going, kept rocking back and forth, back and forth on Uncle Rodney’s couch until I began to flood back into myself too fast for my streams, too fast, and too much.

  ‘No!’ I screamed. ‘No!’ I wanted only the light from the eye of the sheep, but my dad didn’t let go. ‘Mum! Mum!’ I called. The same hands that had hit and pushed and punched my mum now held me as the force rushed hard through my skin. It was going to split me, and tear me, and I would come out, all of me pouring onto Uncle Rodney’s floor, but for my dad’s arms holding me together. He was over me, greater than me, and he said, ‘Jim, son . . . Jim,
son . . .’ over and over, and his hands were around my body so that the old imprint from the first time he ever held me was awakened. I was awakened.

  Part Six

  It was almost night. Dad and me were sitting on the long chairs on Uncle Rodney’s verandah. There was a glass of milk in my hands, and in the sky a single star. The clouds behind the star were grey and silver and purple. Dad kept very still as he sat; he was in the narrow land that ran between lost and found and he didn’t yet know his way. But there was no Cutty Sark left in him; only the spaces left behind, like the roads after a storm when the puddles have been washed away. Potholes, wet streets, houses that had been damaged, furniture floating, ending up in the wrong places – that was my dad, saved from the flood. He looked at me and said, ‘It was your coming all that way on your own that did it, Jim. If you could, then I could.’

  I had shown my dad; I, Jimmy Flick, had shown him. ‘It was a long way, Dad. A long way.’

  He nodded. ‘It was.’ Then he said, ‘I’m not sure I know how to do this, Jim. But I want to try.’

  I drank down my milk in one long swallow, then I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. ‘I’ll give you a chance, Dad,’ I told him.

  Lines like arms spiralled around us. They reached up into the sky and joined us to the clouds and the single star. They connected me and my dad to each other, and to the world.

  Uncle Rodney came through the back door. ‘I’ll pick up some beers,’ he said.

  Dad said, ‘I’m not drinking.’

  ‘Staying off the hard stuff, hey?’ said Uncle Rodney.

  ‘Off the soft stuff too, Rod. It’s over.’ His voice was sharp and tough, like he was ready for the fight.

  There was quiet for a while, only the sound of crickets calling in the night on their leg bows. Uncle Rodney said, ‘You can stay on the island, Gav – at least for a while. Keep close.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  Uncle Rodney leaned against the railing of the verandah and looked at the sky; more stars had joined the single. ‘There are alcoholics on the island, Gav. Some of the worst.’ He grinned, before becoming serious. ‘I know what I’m dealing with.’

  Dad shook his head slowly. ‘Right.’

  ‘I can get you work on the boats. You’d be home early so you could be there for the kid. I could help out a bit. Amanda knows someone too. And you know she works at the school. She wants to help.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Be good to have you fellas close for a while. Family.’

  ‘Yeah.’ My dad was stiff, as if he wasn’t used to the word and it stuck.

  I took his hand. ‘Yeah, Dad.’

  Uncle Rodney’s phone rang. He went back inside. Dad and I sat and looked at the light; it kept changing, like the sea. It went from pale at the bottom to dark blue to almost black. Soon Uncle Rodney came back outside. He was smiling. ‘That was your brother, Jimmy. He’s back on dry land.’

  For the first time that night I slept, as if my father had a power that ran through his inner liquids and was potent with sleep. The steam came through like osmosis and travelled through the lids of my eyes, heavying and drooping them so that I fell into a place both empty and full, where up was balanced by down, and down by up. I slept with my father close, the warm broad panel of his living back against mine. In the morning I saw that the lines were there between all things but the line that led to my mother was gone.

  The tears moved down my streams, catching the pain and carrying it through my pipes and down my legs and into the earth. I looked up through water as the world shook and wobbled. Dad was awake and he said, ‘Jim, I am sorry.’

  Epilogue

  Dad, Uncle Rodney, me and Ned sat on the island pier, watching the sun go down. It was crossing to the other side to give them a turn, giving space to the moon that would soon be above us. White birds dipped and rose over the waves looking for the shining tails of fish just below the surface, then swooping for them, beaks as sharp as arrows. My dad sat beside me. We weren’t touching but his flesh went out beyond where it was visible, giving me a cloak which I could sit inside. Uncle Rodney sat next to my dad, joined to him by the waves they had surfed, the wives they had lost, by the drawings on their arms, by Mother Beloved and by me.

  Ned was with us, his messages running easily through him, with space between each one, coming through him like water. He was the go-between, going between the animal kingdom and this one. I watched the waves as they rolled and crashed towards us, one after another, never stopping, always changing. I knew what was making them come, I had been there and I would always know.

  Someone shouted. ‘Jim! Jimmy!’

  I turned and saw Robby coming up the pier, his thin legs sweeping him towards me.

  ‘They told me at the shop you might be here.’ Robby was speaking to my dad but he was looking at me, only me, Jimmy Flick, the one brother who had lived the same years and seen the same things and was there when she died. He came close, bent down, put his arms around me and he cried and so did I, so did I, and I knew where crying was made; it was made in me.

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to Jane Palfreyman, Ailsa Piper, Richard Walsh, Sue Walsh, Christa Munns, Luke Elliot, David Francis, Madeleine Meyer, Gail Jones, Dmetri Kakmi, Peta Murray, Ali Lavau and to Marc, for taking Sonny into the wetlands.