His Illegal Self by Peter Carey

Author:Peter Carey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Contemporary, Adult
ISBN: 9780571245215
Publisher: Faber
Published: 2007-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

29

His dad’s features existed in his mind like a face made by a windblown tree, but he did have one stable picture and this was in his back pocket and sometimes, in the hot afternoons, he went down into the rain forest to look at it in private. There, in the abandoned dusty little hut with the spooky sculptures by its door, he lay on the sneezy floor together with all his papers and rubber bands. Even in this gloomy place the light shone through his father’s curly hair. Angel-headed hipster, Cameron said.

Not the man in Seattle. Not the man with the hose. That man had a mustache which lifted and shivered as if disgusted by the life in front of him. He bore no resemblance to the photo on the floor.

The afternoons were slow and thick as ants. From the door of the abandoned shack the boy could see the melancholy clouds above the ridge as they folded and dissolved and changed from old men into pretty girls into weeping women, growing warts, losing teeth, a mess. He thought he liked this, but he didn’t. He packed up his papers and secured them one more time with the rubber band. Under the front step he found a rusty tomahawk and he chopped angrily at what they called a wattle tree and watched the black blood come out of the wet white. He hated where he was. He had stolen a clasp knife from Adam’s box and now he whittled at a stick, and although he never felt it cut, the knife slipped, maybe twenty times, and sliced up his fingers. Not really blood, just sticky, sour, no real difference from the sweaty heat, everything smudging into everything else.

He stayed in the forest, hiding from Dial in case she wanted him to walk into Yandina once again.

Dial did not like to drive. They had to walk four miles along a dusty road, four miles back. The heat would kill a spider. Hippies did not stop for them. When they got home, Trevor did not visit. All the single mothers could have said how weird that was, but no single women talked to them. They did not like Buck. They’ll get used to us, he said.

In the town he had a sneaky traitor’s heart and he would stare like a maniac at anyone who glanced his way. Not having been arrested, he trudged back out along Remus Creek Road. It was not home no matter what she called it, but sometimes he saw how it contained the parts of home he would rather have forgotten—the color of sadness, the same light on the moss side of the trees.

They weeded, Dial and he. They slept when the day got too hot. They found wild cherry tomatoes twining through the knee-high grass. The tomatoes burst inside their mouths, hot and wet, like vegetables from outer space. She was kind to him, but teary in the mornings.

The forest around the huts was laced with narrow winding trails, like veins in a creature as yet unnamed.

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