Escape by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780987089755
Publisher: Spineless Wonders
Published: 2011-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Home

Allison Browning

Those wolves — no, they were foxes, I kept calling them wolves because I could never seem to get the name right — I was scared the first time I heard them call. They sounded like crying children. But you explained they were only going through the dustbins searching for scraps. Before long the noises became familiar and I didn’t hear them any more.

Your toilet flushed differently. I would marvel at the lever. The thing was loose, didn’t really work properly, but it didn’t bother me, it was new to my eyes. For the first two weeks I’d press the top of the cistern in the night forgetting where I was — blindly fumbling for a button to push, knocking over your shampoo, toothbrush and random objects gathered on top, a convenient shelf in a small space. In my sleepy fug I was somewhere else, somewhere warm, somewhere where bathrooms were without levers and oil heaters and such. In the dark, your townhouse heated, warm like any Australian summer night, I might have crawled back into your bed thinking myself home, none the wiser. If it were not for that lever, I might have been at home. I might have padded back to your room though unfamiliar doorways, a map of my own in my mind. But there was the lever: the constant fumbling for the familiar. In the dark was the smell of your shampoo — paw-paw and coconut. That tropical scent seemed so far removed from the cold bathroom tiles and your musty feather duvet. Far from home. In your mismatched bedding there was the scent of your coconut head. Coconut wrapped in cheap haberdashery.

Your double glazed window and I grew intimate. Catching glimpses of everything and nothing much. My eyes like the shutter lens of your Lomo camera. (Both of us taking records, memories for later.) My hands pressed up to the thick pane as I watched vapor trails. They lined the sky making patterns, crossing out clouds, making maps for birds. They were just pollution you said, but to me they were magic. You said those things in a voice that sounded sing-song. ‘Wa-er’ you’d say missing the ‘t’. And ‘grass,’ with a sharp sounding ‘A’. ‘Ass’ you said. Like the other name for a donkey. Splayed out on your bed, I’d listen to your melody. ‘Just a common twang,’ you’d said it was. But your song made even the dirty words seem beautiful.

Sometimes I’d pretend it was hot. When I missed the heat of home enough. You’d arrive back from work, the stars out and the bite of cold on your skin. You would open the door, the crisp rush charging up the stairs. You would catch me wearing the only shorts I’d packed, the heating turned up to full, Paul Kelly playing on the stereo. Me, looking lost, barefoot on your threadbare carpet. You not knowing what to do.

There was the attic, a childhood dream manifested, to keep me occupied. I was searching for things, nothing in particular.

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