Dark Jelly by Alice Tawhai

Author:Alice Tawhai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Huia (NZ) Ltd

The Electrician’s Apprentice

When Margaret-Ann was a teenager, she loved Jesus. She went to church with a friend, and was overcome by the emotion that she felt as people cried and clapped.

After the services, she felt light and drained, as if she’d just woken up from a long sleep. She put a black bumper sticker on her Dad’s car with PROUD TO LOVE JESUS written across it in white block letters. She went to Christian youth camps, and when she touched herself in bed at night, she fantasised about Jesus’ cock.

The longer she dreamed about him, the more real he got. But at the same time, he got further away. How could someone so real be so unable to be touched? The warmth of his skin was in her head and in her heart, but not at the ends of her fingertips.

Margaret-Ann lived with her father. She would come home every night and see him, in front of the TV, with his dinner tray on his knee, smoking a bit of pot to wind down from his day at work. And after she’d said hi, it was as if he forgot that she was there.

He worked for Hazchem, hosing down P labs and chemical spills, lumbering around in a white suit as if he was walking through water in slow motion. Spraying down walls, and floors and everything in the room, with a long metal tube attached to a tank strapped to his back. As if it was oxygen, and he needed it to breathe. There was always a bad smell, an invisible chemical stench that smelled dirty and rotten, but just like Jesus, it was nothing you could touch.

Margaret-Ann had seen her father at work once, dousing down a truck spill in the middle of town, moving through the portable shower in his heavy suit, lifting his arms as if they weighed more than he could carry. Behind him, in a shop window, banks of TVs moved together in perfect time, like robots gesturing with fifty artificial limbs, glowing blue and orange and misty gold in the darkness. She remembered the policeman being angry with her for getting so close, because even though her father was in plain sight, she couldn’t go to him.

Sometimes Margaret-Ann thought of him as if he was a survivor of nuclear disaster, wandering the world at a distance from everyone else. Set apart by the toxicity of his work. She didn’t know it, but her father was in the grip of fear, certain that the chemical exposure had altered his cells, mutating them into cancers, growing and taking hold of his body. He imagined that he felt them spreading; seeping through his body and strangling the life out of him, till that was all he could feel, his insides but not his outside.

The reason that Margaret-Ann had fallen in love with Jesus was because she felt so lonely. She didn’t remember her mother. And her father moved silently around the house, as if he wasn’t there.

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