ROCKS IN THE BELLY EXCERPT I
I used to tell people I was a foster child. As a boy I told that to every new stranger until it started nestling in me as a sort of truth. A truth that’s still here, keeping me from belonging.
I used to tell people I was a foster child even though I was the only one in our home who wasn’t fostered. And now I’m supposedly a man everything about me is still fostered – my country, the history I tell people. I can’t even bring myself to belong to my own childhood.
But I can still feel the truth of it, despite moving overseas, disavowing myself entirely of my past. It doesn’t matter where you go then, or what you do with your feelings, your truth lies in wait. My childhood always with me in much the same way my fists are always with me.
Moving away hasn’t allowed me to leave my parents behind either. I carry them in all those remembered moments they inflict on you. Mum especially. Funny that of all those steeped-in memories, the moment where she’s most vivid is from a day of supreme greyness. The day we buried Robert. Everyone gathered round the television to watch that video of him.
Not the Robert who’d come up our path years before, hiding behind the social worker. Not that thoughtful, clever little Robert. Special little Robert. But the Robert we turned him into.
I remember the TV was turned up too loud, Robert full of gangly smiles towards the camera while they strapped him up. His played-back face looking right at me. Someone made a comment about how great he looks in his orange outfit, and Mum managed a smile too. Then Robert’s hair was fluttering on the screen, both him and the man behind him wearing goggles. Robert all tongue and teeth and movement, his trembling brain fidgeting him with excitement.
There is a rough edit.
His hair is really blowing and he’s strapped to the man and screeching with a mix of fear and happiness. They shuffle him along on his bum, and from the movement of the camera you see Robert, the walls, Robert. Then, through the open door, the clouds. Great, billowing clouds in a vast sky. Robert of the Clouds, Dad always used to call him, or Robert McCloud. Our lounge bursting with people. All of them dressed in black, and carrying the colour as if it were heavy.
Everyone crying over Robert’s happiness coming at us from inside the TV – from back in time. Crying because that’s all that was left of what he might have been.
The camera pans to Robert perched on the edge.
“ONE”
His tremors are still there, his eyes smiling. The man tells him to put his head back and Robert’s exhilaration erupts as a giggling squeal.
“TWO”
He is totally still. I remember the whole room stopped too. Everyone who’d come to bury him held their breath.