When Eric Dando’s first novel, Snail, came out in Australia in 1996, he was the youngest author to ever have been published by Penguin. Since then Eric has released a second book titled Oink, Oink, Oink and had short stories included in various collections and anthologies including those by Cordite and Sleepers.
I stop to fill up the radiator but I have to let it cool down first. I’m too scared to unscrew the radiator cap. I’m not good at waiting so I wander into the bush from the roadside.
Walking through the bush, picking chocolate lilies for my grandmother, smoking big reefers, trainspotting magic mushrooms for pure mycological fascination. I try to get lost in the trees, but I can still hear the woodcutters and werewolves in Ford Escorts tearing up the highway. I try to imagine the trees without the people, but it’s impossible. I count sheep. I try to sleep for a hundred years inside a ring of mushrooms, but it’s no good. I can’t sleep.
The Kingswood has the original radio so I only have AM. I listen to American Indian stories on Radio National but it fades in and out all dry and crackly through the Wombat State Forest. I keep thinking about the old Indian story I heard about the end of everything and the beginning of everything and the end that keeps beginning as I drove through the psychedelia of light playing on the road from the eucalyptus.
There is a cave that is very hard to find, says the radio, and inside the cave there is an old woman who is making a shirt. And within the stitching and embroidery she puts all the good things and bad things she sees around her and the shirt is nearly finished and she is just working on the hem and she is using porcupine quills but she has to soften them first with her teeth and she has been doing this for a very long time and her teeth are down to nubs just above the gums. And she stitches the quills and everything else into the hem of the garment and it is nearly finished.
And there is a fire in the back of the cave and over the fire is a bubbling soup brimming with all the trees and plants and mushrooms from the earth and the old woman has to put the shirt down sometimes to stir the soup on the fire. If the old woman forgets to stir the soup then some of the plants and mushrooms might stick on the bottom of the pot and burn and be lost forever.
But there is a black dog that lives in the cave with the old woman and while she is stirring the soup on the fire he picks up the shirt and shakes it from side to side and undoes the embroidery. So the old woman picks up her ruined mess and sits down and begins work on a new shirt with bits and pieces of the old shirt but she also puts all the good things and bad things she sees around her.
‘You should be happy about that black dog,’ the old people say to the young people when they tell this story. Because everything has been made and remade and remade again which is the hidden meaning within the beginning and end of this story.
There is more information about all of this fading in and out on Radio National but it’s cut off by the Wombat State Forest and all I hear is fuzz and static and white noise and eventually I shut it off. So I drive on in silence. Just the perfect noise of the engine that has only just been tuned by the previous owner.
I put my Kingswood on the highway and point it at my grandmother, I drive through the forest to get there. She should be dead by now. She is mostly dead now. She has been dead about five years but we still visit sometimes.
See, look at me there in the corridor, dressed in red, lost in her house. It’s a bit like Little Red Riding Hood. I am Little Red Riding Hood. What about that woman there, is that my grandmother? No. That is somebody else’s grandmother. They have put a lot of old people together in the same home. It’s not just me, everybody is confused and bewildered and disorientated. Creeping deeper into the piss and glow, lost in the labyrinth, guided by old men, they’ve forgotten their names, they don’t know where they are. Lost in my grandmother’s house, intercepted by nurses, teleported to her bedside.
She’s thinned out to bones and skin and teeth, she is so tiny, a miniature buccaneer. I stick the lilies in the vase, I tell the nurse to smell them but she has a cold. ‘Smell them’, I say, but it’s no good she doesn’t want to.
‘They smell like chocolate,’ I say. The nurse tries to wake my grandmother up a few times like she is trying to wake up a lazy child. ‘Wakey-wakey,’ she says, ‘Hello, wakey-wakey.’ She is trying to open her eyes but the liquids won’t let her. The nurse is annoyed and the chemicals are gushing through her brain and flushing down her spinal chord and her lungs rattle and there’s a frightening hiss. My grandmother shifts in her posture and there is this gurgling and farting and squishing. The nurse wants to leave me alone with my grandmother, dematerialises into the paintwork, reflecting herself down the hallway, refracting. I am pretending that I am in that scene from The Goonies. It is easy to pretend that my grandmother is Blind Boy Willy, the dead pirate skeleton in The Goonies.
I take a stupid tacky bible quote from the wall, unpin it, put it in my pocket. I am stealing it, I have to protect her from religious smut, dribbly bluebird Jesus crap. She looks cold so I try pulling up the blanket, but her arm is in the way and I don’t want to break it. It feels like a lizard.
I pull back the covers a little bit and sprinkle petals in her bed, she is too stoned to know about me, but she will find these petals, she will find them and wonder. Who left these petals in my bed? Little Red Riding Hood must have left these petals in my bed.
I sit there and feel guilty about stealing religion from my grandmother. Look, what has she got in here except Jesus? I take out the Jesus thing and stick it to the wall again. I feel so full of my own shit. I sit there and wait for something to happen. I look at her wedding photo for a while. Maybe with the pillow, I tell myself. Maybe with a biscuit. But it’s impossible. No. There would be trouble. I would be unpopular.
So I just sit and talk to her, just jibber away at her. Can you hear me? She can’t hear me. Two stoned birds, that’s me and my grandmother. Her eyes roll open for a second, red and moist, but gum shut again. She can’t open her eyes for me. It’s useless.
I tell myself, if I was really Little Red Riding Hood I would leave her door wide open. I would leave a trail of blood through the forest for wild dogs and foxes to find. I tell myself, these are bad thoughts you are having Little Red Riding Hood.
The flowers are in the vase. Holding on to her hand, kiss her on the head, wipe the spit from her lips. I can’t get out of there fast enough, it’s like a fucking maze. Look. See that little brown speck, that’s my Kingswood on the freeway.
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