Datsunland by Stephen Orr

Author:Stephen Orr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, FYB, FIC029000
ISBN: 9781743054901
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: 2017-03-21T04:00:00+00:00

The Shack

IT’S A SMALL HOUSE WITH BIG WINDOWS: possum eyes staring out across the Murray. An old engine on a tree stump. A box of kitchen utensils, a vacuum with a split hose and a frypan the retarded boy (now a man) burned his arm on in 1969. Inside, Frank Harris, a man who, at seventy-five, has already shrunk to the size he was at fourteen, lies awake on a camp-stretcher. He wears a singlet and shorts covered in fish scales, and blood. Looks at his watch and mutters, ‘Christ!’ Wipes sweat from his forehead and starts to cry. Then, just as suddenly, stops. ‘Christopher,’ he says, noticing a hole in the wall where his son once hit it with a hammer.

After four or five hours of sleeplessness (he doesn’t count any more) he sits up and tries to breathe. He steadies himself on the stretcher and takes a deep breath. Reaches over and picks a mask off the floor. Checks the tightness of the tube that joins it to an oxygen bottle sitting in a cradle beside his stretcher. Turns a valve and the oxygen flows. Places the mask over his face, tightens the elastic around the back of his head and breathes again.

He can feel the gas in his lungs. Sucks it, again and again. After a few minutes he feels clear-headed; his hands and feet tensing and relaxing; his legs and arms ready to move. He sits up, but then slouches.

He wonders if there’s any point.

Switching off the oxygen, he removes the mask. Coughs and spits onto the old lime carpet. He can almost feel the fibres in his lungs. The clumps, the masses that clog his alveoli; each growing, swelling, bursting and releasing more cancer into his bloodstream; cells gliding through his arteries, capillaries and veins, coming to rest in his brain, liver, spine—any of the eight places they found before they stopped looking.

Frank clears his throat and spits again. This time it hits a wall, and he can see blood mixed with old mucus.

Despite the fact that he no longer cares about dying, he reaches for the mask again, holds it over his face and breathes deeply. Looks across the room, and his eyes settle on the couch where his son slept for twenty-nine years.

Until he built the shack on the river at Morphett’s Flat.

It’s a leather couch that has split open from a series of creases that now sprout white cotton tendrils. There’s a chain bolted to the floor and, attached to this, a leather shackle that he purchased at a XXX shop in the city. It’s covered with bite marks where Chris, in the middle of one of his turns, would work at it until his gums bled. Over the years he managed to lose three or four teeth.

If he wants to be toothless, let him be toothless, he’d say to himself. If he wants to sit in his own piss, let him.

Once, years before, the government sent someone. Frank covered the chain and shackle with a rug.

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