There is a red brick fence that we visit. It's December in 1966. My dog's ear is as big as a sail. The suburban wind ruffles his rough and greasy kelpie shoulder. 'Rusky,' I whisper, 'the world is coming to get me.' He wanted to be my angel, but he died like my soul.
There is a red brick fence with a wrought iron gate that takes me to the great freeway of adulthood. I prayed as if I could catch the rain in a cup, while I pedaled my three wheeler bicycle over a cliff. God took me as a child and spoke to me through the birds and lizards.
It starts with a white wooden cot and a big red jumper and a blow-in stray dog from Gill Avenue. Here I am on the front verandah of the new house at Rose Street in Liverpool. Rusky sits in front of the garage door. We have claimed our childhood and puppyhood territories. We are the two ends of a skipping rope about to turn itself into playground songs.
At night I am the black and white dog that mum likes, because she likes animals with pretty fur. I am Super Rusky flying through the suburbs in my baggy red jumper. The most significant dream I have is flying into a doll house stored beneath a bed by a green giant. Super Rusky and I save the world and we prefer to sit in the dog box on hot days than play with other kids.
I prefer the simplicity of panting through fur and not having to talk and just a small hand on his side and his soft forehead. It's really simple. I can talk and giggle all I want. We don't have to be taught how to say anything or how to act. It was hard to give birth to my own laughter and my mother let me know about how hard it was for her to give birth to me.
She said, 'you were too big. The doctor made a mistake. We almost died. He had to cut.' I said, 'but isn't that natural? A lot of women are cut.' 'Not in the way that I was cut,' she said, 'I was really cut. He butchered me. But it's okay now. You tend to forget these things, like how bad it was. We're both alive now. That's the main thing.'
I can't stop wetting the cot. Mum is trying to get me out of nappies and I keep dreaming of going to the toilet and peeing like a never-ending-rainbow-seventeen-hues-of-golden-yellow and then I just do it. She says you are slow to learn and undeveloped compared to other children. She said I nearly killed her because she followed Leolord Cordell and ate yoghurt.
She never touched me and I hit kids at school when they didn't do what I wanted them to. I liked them to watch what I was doing from a safe distance, but not to interfere with it. I am a thermo nuclear reactor. Days in the flimsy backyard pool were long and it was something I liked doing, drifting in chlorine and absorbing vitamins from the sun.
In summer the big caterpillars with firecracker hairs spiking out of their backs were eating the trees alive. Sometimes they dropped onto the backyard dirt like squashy green raindrops. I was told they were called spitfires and was frightened of their shapes and colours. I would be particularly frightened if some fell into the Clarke's rubber swimming pool.
I was frightened of dead insects in the pool. When I swam underwater as dad had taught us all to, I would launch my body into the day with dead insects stuck to my arms, shoulders, neck and face or in my hair. The spiders with curled-in waterlogged legs that were indecipherable but with the sting somewhere inside.
Once I squashed a brown house garden spider and it was as big as a five cent piece. All its dusty crumpled body now a mixture of spider. I touched its still centre. It bit me even while it was dead. I was told not to touch the chicks that fell from nests, because if their mothers smelt the human touch on them, they wouldn't want them back.
Were we so bad that a mother would abandon her young? But there were decoy mothers in the wild that did it all the time. I was told not to play with water beetles, but they fascinated me until my fingers stank with them. It was as though I had been touching all the world's money or brassy doorknobs in Grace Bros in Sydney.
Nanny always wiped the knobs with her tissues when I stayed with her during school holidays. 'It's dirty like money,' she said. She did my hands with a moist washer that she carried in a plastic bag and bought me a strawberry milkshake from Coles.
I know of cold lips at the time of the goodnight kiss. Mum's cold lips like a shot of brandy on ice. Good night lovey and her gnawing her chocolate in bed like a rat trying to keep down its teeth. She was sad and lonely. No one loved her. But her bedspread wrapped around her forced something to love her whether it wanted to or not and the rotten cocoa and sugar from the dark brown chocolate sank right into her bloodstream and down into her heart.
It loved her too. The lonely white milk chocolate called 'The Milky Way' because when she ate it her eyes went vast and universal as if slowed by stars and her loving many galaxies in the cosmos in return for ultimate peace. The white milky way was relaxed and creamy yellow on her tongue, while the cow udders it was stolen from were stringy and muscular with mastitis and the veal calf bleating for dear life out on the slaughterhouse floor.
Rusky the black and white kelpie cross travelled with me for a short time. Our life lines crossed the sun of every park we entered and we ran together. We absorbed yards and paths, our tongues touched weather and seasons, our skin was sunlit and often we ate the rain and hailstones. After a while his body gave out and he left this earth after fourteen years of lawns, summers, long dusks, car trips to the beach and all our early stars. I was standing alone and looking for his energy. But no other dimensions were available to me.
The question was where did the dog go? It was easy enough to understand that his body was made up of various particles that dissolved into the earth, but there seemed no good reason for the absence of his being. I had enjoyed his body, his greasy back and white hair, dark gentle eyes, large soft forehead and the switch of his tail, but what really devastated me was the disappearance of his character.
I was so distraught that it would have been enough to have his character return, to swing open a wire screen door or shift a blind or curtain. But as much as waited I never found him again. He returned in dreams right throughout my life. He was glad and old, wagging his tail, glad to be absorbing the hours there.
He was dog glad that my mind dreamed of him once again. But it was not the same. It was not him. He didn't live on there. Rusky, I loved you and now I am forgetting you. I get this feeling that I am gaining things and losing things, but mainly losing things. The best I can do to comfort myself is to recreate images of longing and make believe.
I fear I have forgotten Rusky, even though it was only half my lifetime ago. My life is brief as well. Life is just a large green giant with a head full of leaves and a stone as a heart and neither of us were really Super Heroes. Rusky will not live on in my memory. He will live nowhere. He won't live here in this place that I am building. I can't bring him into this house where the structure was dreamed.
Rusky is gone, then he is gone from my memory. Then I am gone from someone else's memory. So I go on like this, until fading from a memory is only a second and less significant death. Rusky was physical, a house that I lived in. We housed each other's souls as much as we could, closer than the chest muscles colliding.
Oh, Rusky! I couldn't keep you alive and vibrant inside me. I am sorry. But what does it matter to him? He is nothing, was dog, now dog nothing or just dog or just nothing or just. I was a little mother to you dog and now I have failed to keep us both alive.
Oh, my childhood! We sing this as if in chorus, all us beings of one consciousness. As I fail to keep it alive my adult eye is old and sad. The trees surrounding the red brick fence all sigh. They have failed to sustain the sunlight of childhood summers. They have memory too. So many summers are stored inside their systems now. The house wept like a mother.
There was a red brick fence tunneling across our yards and into eternity. 'Remember us,' I whisper, as I fade away from the borders of that time. Remember us as the space between us grows wider and we both fade from each other's presence. If I could have followed the ghost of you I would have. If I could have just remained where I wanted too, I would have. The big mouth of time came to collect me and mindlessly took my soul without recognition or memory.
The dogs of the town were let loose in the wind while all we could do is brave the shelters. We are clouds - the other children, the dog and I, are clouds. We thought that we were super Ruskies and our egos flourished inside the costumes of heroes. We flew around the bedroom in love with each other and attempting the save the world.
We were stupid fools. The earth's atmosphere ate our hearts and swam luxuriously in us until we were sucked down into its source. The earth is a cruel mother, squeezing us out and crunching our bones and brains even as we tear her apart upon entering. We are all each others' worst nightmares. Our dogs' heroes and friends go first, followed by our hearts. Our hearts go next followed by our bodies. I held your rotting body until it became a health risk.
Rusky I searched for your personality until I was obsessed. Your spectre haunted me while I remembered who you were. It was briefer than expected. Your complexities fade to mere black and white. Brave dog you have crossed the border into oblivion and you live inside no one.
It starts with plastic animals, pegs, sand pit, a swimming pool, balancing on two hands, crawling along the blue carpet. It ends with us wrenched apart. Rusky, your black and white body lying in the damp onion grass. I became a lifelong scream. The moment cracked it like a bone, a mirror, a crystal goblet that someone had shattered in their hands. I am alone.
My living heart and his dead body. The silent day that was not him. Our super Rusky and save the world plans, but he left me to this place without him. Our partnership had ended. I waited for him but he went in another direction. It was the direction of invisibility and decomposition.
At first I couldn't let him go and then I couldn't let him go at last. He was my first and last. I was nothing without the house and the dog. There was a red brick fence that he pissed on and on and on. Nothing was accomplished by the world that day and the world hadn't offered a suitable replacement.
If I had only treasured all the times his tail had wagged, instead of pulling and biting on it. I wanted to drop dead, but I couldn't collect enough rage inside. I was thirteen and had just about had enough of living. Everything that meant anything to me was gone so quickly.
