Griffith Review 50 - Cargoes Read online

‘We’ll have breakfast and I’ll take her to the park.’

  She’s about to mention infection, but she stops herself. Ariel’s white-cell count is good enough now, with precautions. That was yesterday’s news.

  ‘You didn’t sleep either,’ she says instead, because it’s decent to note it.

  ‘I’ll sleep after the treatment.’

  She puts her hand out and touches my arm. ‘Thanks.’

  As I’m setting up next to Ariel, Lindsey drifts into the dark bedroom without a word. I can hear her flop onto the bed and roll over. For the first time in hours she is not responsible, and has instantly thrown all switches to sleep. It’s an ability I wish I had.

  I ask Ariel if she’s ready to go and she says, ‘Yeah. You’ll sit next to me?’

  ‘All the way.’

  I would pay fifty bucks, if I had it spare, not to see Frozen one more time. Once we’re through this, all of us, long through it, a single frame of that movie will still put me right back here in this room. It could be forty years, and Frozen will smell like feeding formula to me and feel like Beacon carpet.

  I attach the syringe to the tube, release the clamp and draw up yellow gastric fluid. I swing it around to the front, still attached, for Ariel to check and she says, ‘Good to go.’ It’s an expression she’s picked up at the clinic.

  I push the fluid back down and clamp again. I set up the extension tubing, connect the syringe to that and draw the plunger out with a pop.

  Ariel says, ‘Pop’, as she usually does.

  I run the feed in and attach the apparatus to Ariel’s feeding tube.

  ‘Ready to go,’ I tell her.

  She needs to know that breakfast is about to start. No brain is wired to receive gastric-filling signals when the mouth isn’t engaged, but she has trained herself to imagine food at exactly the right time. I release the clamp and check the flow. Ariel moves in close to me and I put my arm around her, keeping the syringe barrel close to mouth height and letting gravity do its job.

  ‘So, we’ll go to the park today,’ I tell her.

  ‘Really?’ She turns away from the screen and looks at me. She has seen our photos of Central Park, and seen it through a car window.

  ‘Yeah. And I got a tip last night about a particularly good playground.’

  ‘Yay,’ she says in a small voice, acknowledging something positive but not more engaged than that. Her eyes are already back on the TV.

  And we are back in the world, with a park visit. Today is that day, a milestone by my reckoning, even if she’s not one for marking such things. I hug a little closer to her as the level in the syringe slowly falls. I can convince myself she is less obviously bony than she once was.

  ARIEL ELECTS TO go to the park as Batman, with the hood up and clamp tucked back inside it, tube sneaking forward to her nose. That arrangement’s my idea, but she goes along with it. She has not had a public life as a kid with a tube – just the Beacon and the clinic. I’m glad she chose Batman.

  The hotel lends us a stroller, and the concierge even helps me when I pull out a pack of antiseptic wipes and start rubbing it down.

  Ariel and I hit the street smelling more like a hospital than we should, but the breeze soon deals with that. She’s long for the stroller, but you could fold her up and she still wouldn’t fill it. It has a simple frame and wheels with none of the shock absorbency of the Bugaboo at home – Lindsey would not approve – but it will take us where we want to go.

  Ariel looks up through the filtered light at the tree canopies and tall buildings. She is searching for superheroes, she tells me, or supervillains. She confirms with me that she is now on the streets of Gotham City. From the hotel room she has looked out to the water towers, watching for Spider-Man. Superheroes work a decent kind of magic as far as she’s concerned, and she is glad to be in their world.

  On Central Park West a subway train thunders below us, and I stop the stroller on a grate to let her feel the rush of warm wind.

  ‘There’s a famous scene in a movie like this,’ I tell her. ‘A lady standing on one of these grates gets her skirt blown right up.’

  ‘Is it on YouTube?’ she says, gripping the struts of the stroller and peering down at the darkness, her bat ears pointing up and forward. She is the Caped Crusader in his eyrie, vigilant for evil deeds on the grimy streets below. ‘I want to see it.’

  ‘I bet it’s there. We’ll find it.’

  We enter the park near Strawberry Fields and I’m about to tell her we’ll add John Lennon to our YouTube list but she seems more taken with the glum man sitting on a bench selling dollar jokes to no one.

  She makes me read his sign aloud – it’s as if he’s a waxwork or not really there – and, as I wheel her away, she says, ‘But how do you sell jokes? Jokes just are. And what if they’re not funny?’

  Maps have never helped me in Central Park, so I take my bearings from the buildings I can see, and we edge our way east. There is plenty to discuss out in the world, and for Ariel that is as good as anything. I could sleep where I stand, but I thread a few thoughts together and hold up my end of the conversation. It’s a gift just to talk and to be here, not killing time on a moulded plastic chair with my eyes on hospital tiles or the clock, all talk about treatments and prognoses and what just went beep.

  There are shrieks ahead of us, the happy shrieks of children. Then a fence and a sign.

  ‘It’s Johnson or Jackson.’

  It’s meant to stay in my head as a thought only, but I know I’ve made more of it when Ariel says, ‘What? What is?’

  ‘The park. The playground. The one we’re looking for.’

  Billy Johnson, the sign reads. We are here.

  The gate groans as we swing it open, then clangs behind us. It’s a school day, so anyone here to play is small. Two nannies sit on a bench, talking over takeaway coffees. A tourist thumbs through photos on his camera while his boys battle with two sticks and shout at each other in French.

  This is acceptable exposure for Ariel. It’s not a huddle of sick people. The slide, though, might be beyond her. It curves down from the top of a rise in the corner of the playground, and the boy I can see flying along it stacks on the bend and comes off his cardboard. But there are swings and simple structures to climb on. It’s some way to have come not to slide, but I can’t see her making it down there herself.

  ‘It’s a good day, though, isn’t it,’ I say to her, ‘whatever we do here. It’s nice to be outside.’

  She is watching the next slider, who takes the bend like a master, shoots off the end and lands on his feet, his cardboard flipping up behind him.

  ‘Well, if it ain’t the Fosters,’ a voice says behind my shoulder.

  It’s Smokey, in track pants and a T-shirt.

  ‘I didn’t get no sleep neither,’ he says, pulling out his phone. His pants pocket inverts itself and flops from his hip like a dog’s ear. He still has his grills on, and they sparkle like Christmas in the direct sunlight. ‘Here’s my girl.’ He shows me a photo. She has plump mauve lips and swirls of black hair. She’s swaddled and sleeping peacefully. ‘Still decidin’ the name. S’pect I’ll lose on that one too.’ Before I can mention any of the things a person’s supposed to about a photo of a newborn, he says, ‘It was us talking ’bout this place last night that made me come here today. My lady D’vonne’s getting some sleep. We just blowing off a little steam before my boy gets to go meet his sister.’

  The stroller and back view of my tiny Batman arrive properly in his consciousness for the first time. ‘And, hey, who’s this?’

  ‘She’s…’

  He steps around to see her before I can prepare him at all. She’s thinner than the wallpaper shot on my phone. He’s got his happy meeting-a-kid face stuck on and he’s fighting to hold it, to pretend for all our sakes that he’s not shocked.

  ‘Hey, honey,�
� he eventually says, softly, cautiously, as he crouches down. ‘So good to meet you. I’m a friend of your daddy’s.’

  He starts to edge his hand forward to shake or high-five hers, but then settles for resting his forearm on his knee. Ariel sticks a hand out, in high-five pose. She is used to New Yorkers crouching, forcing a smile and a bright tone of voice and then talking through whatever grim thing they are planning to do to her to make her well.

  Smokey looks up at me. ‘Is it cool?’ he says, pointing to her hand and his.

  ‘It is now. Unless you’ve got some disease I should know about.’

  ‘High five,’ he says, and his big hand meets her much smaller one with a satisfying slap. The sun sparks on his grin. ‘No diseases other than sleep deprivation and a distinct lack of popularity with my lady, but we’ll get past that. Now, honey, what we gonna do? What is there in the Billy Johnson Playground that takes your fancy?’ He’s talking animatedly, keeping the grin on, keeping his spiel moving at a clip so that we can all pretend all’s well with our caped crusader. ‘I believe you have already noticed our excellent stone slide, soon to be written about in newspapers across Australia by a man well known to you.’

  I can picture her bones, all her unprotected points, bumping on granite all the way down. She’s had weeks when only sheepskin was close to comfortable, though we’re past that now.

  ‘I don’t know that she’s–’

  Ariel cuts in and says, ‘Dad…I want to.’

  ‘Sure, honey, sure,’ Smokey says. ‘It’s your dad’s call but if he okays it, we can make it work. Because I have a plan.’ He takes a step to move directly in front of her and then crouches again. ‘Some people call me Smokey, honey, but you can call me Eugene. My boy’s over there.’ He indicates the master slider, shooting down again, like a torpedo in a tube. ‘He’s Eugene too, so we made that nice and easy. But we call him Junior, mostly. He’ll answer to either.’ Ariel is staring at his grills as the light dances from the gold. ‘You readin’ my teeth?’ He draws his lips back to give her a good look.

  She laughs. ‘I can do letters.’

  ‘Maybe I best keep my mouth shut then.’

  He folds his lips over his teeth in a comical, bulky way. He holds a hand up and pretends to go on with the conversation about the slide, making all kinds of nonsensical sounds, as though he’s giving a meticulous muffled outline of what he’s got in mind. His free hand is measuring, pointing, making all kinds of shapes, fingers running up steps, sliders on cardboard swooping around the curve, braking screechily or stacking, Wile E Coyote-style. Ariel laughs so much the stroller shakes and takes a hop backwards.

  ‘Yes!’ she shouts, and her hands give an involuntary clap. ‘I want to.’

  Smokey cranks his lips apart with his thumb and finger, making can-opener sounds, and says, ‘We got a plan. She’ll go down with Junior. Tandem. He’ll take all the knocks.’ He reaches into his other pants pocket. There’s a jangle of keys. ‘I’ll get him ready for it too. D’vonne don’t let me out the door without my pockets full of this shit.’

  He pulls out a bottle of green sanitiser, squirts it on his own hands, then calls Junior over and goes to lube his legs.

  ‘What?’ Junior takes half a step back and almost stumbles over his father’s hand.

  ‘Be cool, buddy.’ Smokey wipes another handful of goo down one of Junior’s arms.

  ‘But–’

  ‘I ain’t makin’ you swallow it.’ He lifts Junior’s shirtfront and wipes a final squirt under there. ‘You goin’ tandem and we just playin’ it safe.’ He clips the empty bottle shut and slips it back into his pocket. ‘Now, you take Batman up there and you look after her like she’s a princess. A superhero princess. You come down together and you take all the bumps.’

  Junior’s mouth opens – he is not a tandem rider, not here as a helper of princesses – but his father has a hand on his arm and is looking straight at him, willing him to just do it, no arguments, just this once. Junior reads the expression, and glances towards Ariel and back to his father. He knows something is up. He knows it is one of those times. He nods.

  Ariel takes my hand to get out of the stroller, and then Eugene Junior offers his and leads her towards the stone steps. He measures his speed against hers and holds back a branch of a bush so that it doesn’t brush her arm. She waits on the second step while he retrieves his cardboard. He tucks it under one arm and takes her hand again.

  Inside the black suit, she is frail, but she is sick of lambswool and complete safety and one DVD after another. She is four and must attend to a four-year-old’s business, and she must slide today, whatever the knocks. I am afraid for her, for all of us, Lindsey and me too. There are more steps to the top of the slide than I realised. I have seen her X-rays and her scans and her worst days.

  They wait their turn, still holding hands. Ariel is closely studying the sliders ahead and every bit of their journey down. Eugene Junior looks over to his father to check that he’s getting it right. Smokey gives him a nod.

  ‘You taking pictures of this?’ he says to me. ‘You got an article to write, yeah? I think Batman’s about to slide.’

  There’s just enough time for me to get my camera out. Every article is patched together this week, this month. I could have left this playground without a single image.

  ‘Here, let me,’ he says. ‘You just watch.’ He holds his hand out for the camera, clicking his fingers.

  I need to watch, and he is giving me the chance. I need to live this, not be its recorder.

  He fiddles with the settings, sets up the shot in a second. He knows what he’s doing.

  Eugene Junior places his cardboard, then helps Ariel into a sitting position on it, one of his hands on the lip of the slide the whole time and one on her. He eases his legs around her. She keeps hers straight, but his are bent a little, knees jutting out to take any knocks. He puts one arm around her waist and she grips it with both hands, like a rail on a rollercoaster. He takes his other hand from the slide’s granite edge and pushes it against the base, just behind where he’s sitting. They start to move, and he gives another push.

  They skid forward, building up speed. Ariel’s teeth are clenched, but she’s smiling. Her eyes are ahead on the slide, anticipating. The two of them swing into the bend, Eugene Junior perfectly managing their path. Wind buffets her suit. The drop is steep.

  The hood blows back from her head, her messy blonde hair spilling all around, the red clamp of her tube bobbing next to her ear. She lets go of his arm and they wobble, but he corrects. She reaches up. I’m expecting her to grab the hood and pull it back into place, but she ignores it completely and thrusts her arms up in the air, keeping them there all the way down until she is standing in the dust and the ride is over.

  ‘Again,’ she says as Eugene lets go of her and bends down to pick up the cardboard. ‘Please.’

  ‘Let’s see here,’ Smokey says, flicking back to the early images as Ariel and his son make their way back towards the steps.

  He’s found a setting that fired every fraction of a second. We track them from top to bottom, one picture at a time. The hood blows back, the tube appears and my first thought is it won’t be hard to photoshop it out. Smokey clicks to the next image, and the next, and then pauses on one.

  The sunlight is falling across Ariel’s pale outstretched arms and lighting up her wispy hair. She is upright and fearless, and I hadn’t seen that. She is looking straight at the camera. Her hands are bunched into small pale fists. She is flying for a moment, in defiance of gravity. It is, after all, a city of superheroes, of caped crusaders and heroic deeds. She wants me to have a good photo. She wants to give me a picture of a good time.

  ‘Look at your beautiful girl,’ Smokey says.

  ‘Yeah.’

  She has done it for me and for her mother. Not every minute of our present is to be recorded as diabolical a
nd hard, and something to be endured in the hope of better. She is in the present – this present, between the tube feed and today’s treatment – and she has made room for joy in it.

  The tube will stay in the photo we publish, and I will argue for that if I have to.

  I hear a voice, just beyond the playground, and my first thought is it’s someone I know, but it’s an Australian accent that I’ve caught. There’s a couple in their twenties walking past, eyes on the path in front of them, arguing. He’s in a black T-shirt with white writing and, through the fence, I mistake it for a Ramones logo before it makes itself clear. They’re disagreeing about money. I can hear enough to know that. They’re missing New York for it on this bright, good morning. I would go over and tell them, try to talk some sense, but it would do no good. It’s all ahead of them, the worst and the best of it, and theirs to make sense of when it arrives.

  ‘Lydell’s granddaddy,’ Smokey says, ‘he worked at Bloomingdale’s. He was an elevator guy. Had a uniform with a cap.’ He pauses. ‘This is just us talking, right? Just so you know. He died on the job one day. Heart attack. Just closed his eyes on his stool and he was gone. Bloomingdale’s looked after the family real good. Lydell’s momma ran wild even so. She was fourteen, or somethin’.’ He glances over to our kids, who are close to the top of the steps again. ‘Lydell’s sleepin’ somewhere with a smile on his face. For now. He called me, as instructed, when you got back to your hotel. I get him to check in, day or night. It was, like, 5 am and he was still talking ’bout those pants he didn’t buy. Those Alexander Wangs. That boy… He’s just a boy, and it’s so dangerous sometimes. I want to help him be a man, you know. We all do whatever to bring our kids up, yeah? Give them whatever. Whatever it takes.’

  At the top of the slide, Eugene Junior sets the cardboard in place. Ariel takes her seat, flips her hood back and shakes her hair out. She braces herself to push.

  Nick Earls is the author of twenty books for adults, teenagers and children. Two of his novels have been adapted into feature films and five into stage plays. ‘Cargoes’ is one of five novellas he is writing for publication as a series in mid-2016. His work has previously appeared in Griffith Review 7, 27 and 30.