vanadis - matt youngmattyoungwriter.com/.../2016/05/vanadis-voiceworks.pdf · vanadis by matt young...
TRANSCRIPT
MuM DIDN'T TAKE well to Dad smoking in
the house. He would sneak a cheeky one,
as he used to say, in the empty chicken
shed out back. You could always smell it
on him, noxious like gum and ammonia.
To keep it a secret, he bribed me with
a Cabbage Patch Kid that had a plastic
window on its belly where you could
put a four-by-six photo. The one I put
in there was of the two of us, taken on
our holiday to Lake Conjola the January
before I started primary school. Dad had
a thick, dark moustache and pink short
shorts, fluorescent even in oversaturated
Kodachrome. I was wearing an olive
green Gumby trackie jumper. Dad was
holding a lifeless luderick and the fishing
line that had seduced it to an air-induced
asphyxiation.
'The human body is more resilient
than we give it credit for.' That's what Dad
would say. VB was his preferred tinny.
After a night on the cans he slept heavy and
kept everyone else awake with his apnoea.
It was at the time my body was becoming
slick and vigorous that Dad started
getting sick. We had watched Hitchcock's
The Birds the night before he had to go to
hospital with a fever and abdominal pain.
When I did find sleep between tears and
anxious procrastination, I dreamt that
night-drenched crows were eating my
dad's insides through tiny holes in his flesh.
VANADIS
BY MATT YOUNG
When I was too young to comprehend
its very concept, Dad took me to the gun
placements underneath Hill 60 to look
at nothing. There had once been pipes
with nozzles six inches wide that pointed
out at the ocean, at nothing, waiting for
warships that never came. As Dad led me
down through the shrub to the abandoned
concrete bunker, hang-gliders, maybe
three, exploiting the ocean winds, were
taking off from the lookout above. The
bunker was decaying, dry with graffiti.
'This is where the nation's sons protected
Australia,' Dad said, and I believed
him. Off the coast there was a freighter,
expectant with coal, nursed close between
Five Islands and the horizon. I imagined
a gun battery pirouetting on its axis and
unloading deposits of shrapnel and fire
upon the freighter, its hull crumbling
like a soggy Milk Arrowroot. The hang
gliders, overhead now, with their gaudy
kites floating on the sounds that mpved
the ocean, also entered themselves into my
fantasy. Their sails pleating as they dived,
clutching the crew from the splintering
ship and carrying them into the heavens.
As I grew older, I understood more, knew
less, and the world stopped being magical.
Since before I can remember Dad
worked at the Cintec plant, making the
sulphuric acid used in the production of
fertiliser, and he would come home with
hands stained yellow like brass. It was
the yellow on those hands that made the
mortgage repayments, clothed and fed
me, paid for Mum's new VN Commodore
when the Kingswood carked it. It was also
those same yellow hands that demanded
compensation in human life. Dad's tests
came back as leukaemia. One time, when
he wasn't in Sydney for one of his four
day stints of VAMP regimen, I caught
him sneaking a cheeky one. I tore him to
shreds. I tore him to shreds and I cried and
I promised him I wouldn't tell Mum. By
then, the jaundice in his hands had spread
to his face.
Kirk Trajkovski was my first kiss.
It was at the bench on top of Hill 60.
Someone's house party on Military
Road, I can't remember whose, had been
broken up by coppers just after midnight.
A residual group had wandered around
to Fisherman's Beach and, their blood
infected with witchcraft and hormones,
had gone skinny dipping, bodies smooth
and marble white -the girls' still sated with
baby fat, the boys' fighting erections. The
water, black and cold against the world.
We broke off. My hair and bra were heavy
with seawater. The stacks bellowed, silent,
the smoke booming passively like it was
spurting from cracks in the ocean floor. I
watched the flames from the steelworks
interminably blossom and furl behind