28. Trampolines and Boys with Broken Bones
When I was little – so little, in fact, that I couldn’t distinguish my parents’ angry voices from their excited ones – I used to watch the boy who lived in the house beside us bounce on his trampoline every afternoon. I had always wanted a trampoline, but Mum and Dad never remembered at Christmas time. The boy, after a few weeks, realised that I was watching him. He started to show off, performing trick after trick until he was so exhausted that sometimes he would give up if he thought I wasn’t watching anymore. His favourite trick was a double somersault. He would jump and jump and jump until he got really high into the air and then hurl his legs over his head twice and somehow land back on his feet again.
After school one day the boy jumped too high. He tried to spin over a second time, but he wasn’t quite fast enough. His shoulder hit the metal frame and he bounced clean off the newly painted trampoline. There was no grass to cushion his fall.
The very next day, the boy’s parents moved the trampoline into their front yard and attached a large square of cardboard to it. On the cardboard, they had written the words “For Sale” in long red letters. I asked Mum and Dad if we could buy it. They were too excited to notice me.
I don’t know why I had expected anything different. I stared at the empty space in the backyard, a crop circle of unmown grass where the trampoline used to be, and watched a magpie forage for insects between the blades.
Not long after the trampoline left its middle-class suburban life for better things, we left too. I was seven when we moved to the big city. Trampolines and boys with broken bones became a part of my other self – the one before the 52nd floor.
When I open the front door of the apartment, the photographs hanging in perfect symmetry along the hall smile at me, snug inside their little frames. Sometimes they look down at me with pity, and I know that they’re thinking the same thing I am. It would be nice to crawl into a moment, like that Christmas Eve we decorated little gingerbread versions of ourselves, and never leave it again.
Mum must have spent the day cleaning. The heavy red curtains cloaking the floor-to-ceiling windows are not dull with dust anymore, the abstract paintings hanging between them are flawlessly aligned, and the photograph of my parents on their wedding day glares at me across the room.
Mum and Dad are in the kitchen. They are very excited tonight.
I can hear disconnected words standing out in garbled speech, and they make a collage in my mind. I dump my school bag by the shoe rack and prop my violin case against the wall. I’ll get in trouble for that later, no doubt.
I wish our curtains were blue, like the sky. They would look much better if they were blue. Red’s an angry colour. My home is not angry.
I stop in the doorway to the kitchen and wait. Please be excited please be excited please be excited.
Dad’s voice is raspy, cracked, like he’s spent too many years trying to be heard over loud construction machinery, when, in reality, he’s an office worker. An executive at LexiGrowth, this big marketing firm. That’s why we moved here. He was promoted and it was a done deal. New school, new friends, new bed, new neighbours, whether I liked it or not.
I love my parents; my parents love me.
Mum’s voice is clipped as she curses at Dad. He’d forgotten to go to the bakery, another promise broken. The oven door slams. The scent of freshly baked chocolate cake wafts towards me and I breathe it in. I remember the cake Mum made me for my thirteenth birthday. That day, even I couldn’t mistake her for being excited.
My mother used to sing to me when I was very little. Back then, my parents were neither angry nor excited all the time. Back then, I couldn’t tell the difference. Back then, I didn’t understand.
I wish I still didn’t understand now.
I was a rescue attempt, a life buoy they had thrown at each other when it seemed sure that they would drown. I stayed buoyant enough for the three of us for seventeen years, but now I’m deflating. I couldn’t hold on long enough.
Dad laughs then, and I hate the sound. It’s a mocking laugh. It’s not the kind of sound he should be making. Mum knows this. I flinch at the sound of her voice and scramble backwards, retreating to the living room. I knock my elbow against the kitchen doorframe and a searing pain shoots up my arm.
I love my parents; my parents do not love each other.
Mum’s screaming at Dad now, but I can’t make out the words. My elbow hurts. My elbow really hurts.
I hear something smash. It reminds me of the time I threw a porcelain bowl into the sink to see if either of them would notice me. It broke into a myriad of uneven pieces. I cut myself on one of them when I cleaned it up. Dad yelled at me for getting blood on his tea towel.
I flop onto the couch and turn on the TV, holding the volume button down until the newsreader’s voice is so loud that I feel like it’s assaulting me. I watch a story about an abandoned lamb that was taken in by a small kid and his parents. There is footage of him feeding the lamb, sleeping with it in his bed, having a bath with it. They proudly report that they’re in the process of toilet training the lamb, which the boy has named Robert. I feel hollow. The closest I ever had to a pet was sea monkeys. My cousin drank them.
“CAN YOU TURN THAT DAMN TELEVISION DOWN?”
I look up at my father. He stares down at me with cold eyes and I consider throwing the remote at him, screaming back, asking him to tell me why I need the TV so loud in the first place. But I don’t. There is no point.
I turn the TV off and abandon the couch, walking over towards the window so that my back is to him. The newsreader’s voice is cut off mid-sentence, and silence falls as Dad returns to the kitchen.
I love my parents; I think they love me.
I pull the curtains back and stare at the city I’m supposed to love while Mum and Dad resume their argument. It will never end. It will always be this and me and them and the yelling. A broken promise here, a snide remark there, another dinner missed.
I don’t realise that I’m doing it until it’s done. I watch the ugly thing my mother calls a work of art soar through the spotless glass and down towards the street below. I realise too late that it’s probably going to hit someone and rush up to the window to follow its descent, praying that it doesn’t.
I don’t mind the red curtains in this moment. They are so thick that they shield me from the shattering glass. Unlike when I smashed that bowl, none of my blood is racing to escape my body, to find freedom from the confines of my skin.
I kick out more of the glass before I’m satisfied. Now that’s art. The cityscape looks more beautiful this way, framed with fractured glass and blood red curtains.
Mum and Dad have fallen silent. Finally. I hear footsteps.
I step forward.
The sky is a grey lady; rolls and folds of skin decorate her body and through her heavy, drooping eyelid, her golden eye winks at me. I smile at her.
I can feel the cold air beating against my skin. The grey lady’s breath pushes me forwards, further and further away from the 52nd floor, and I wait for her to sing to me.
When I was in grade four, my teacher asked the class what we wanted to be when we grew up. I thought about the boy on the trampoline. I wanted to be him, although I never said so. Instead, I told the class what they wanted to hear – that I wanted to be a doctor so that I could help sick people get better. But I’ve never wanted to be a doctor. A doctor once told me that there was something wrong with me. I wouldn’t have cared if it weren’t for the way he had said it. Like he thought I was defective, a toy with a missing part. My parents got very excited about it. How dare he say that there was something wrong with their daughter, they argued, as I cried alone in the backseat. Everything was just fine.
I am remembering a lot of things right now. Like the fact that I didn’t take my medication this morning, or yesterday morning, or the morning before that, or the one before that one. The fact that I didn’t tell my parents I loved them before I threw their sculpture out of the window. The fact that I can almost feel their arms, intangible and insufficient, grappling for me from so far away.
I can see the people below clearly now – and the cars. There’s a blue one parked against the curb in front of the Laundromat. It looks exactly like our old next-door neighbours’ car. They carried the boy into the backseat of it after he fell off the trampoline.
I know it’s raining before anyone below does. I can smell the rain, feel the drops on my back, my neck, my hands, my feet and the bare skin of my forearms as I hold out my arms.
I am thinking about the boy on the trampoline now. Even eight years later, I still want to be him. Maybe this is my chance.
I picture him exactly as I saw him the last time he used his trampoline, trying to complete a double somersault for me. He ran out of air to fall through and found the ground instead of the cushioning net of his trampoline. His parents ran towards his cries and I watched them wipe their sleeves over his wet cheeks.
The grey lady is singing now, so loudly that the sound reverberates through my bones. I open my mouth and I taste her tears, fresh and cool on my tongue. At least she cries for me.
I hear footsteps on broken glass. And then my name, spoken like it’s the most important word in the world.
I love my parents; my parents love me.
Ashleigh Young is an emerging writer from Meanjin/Brisbane. She studied creative writing at Queensland University of Technology and is featured in Hawkeye Publishing's anthology, If Found, Please Return. She loves weird girl fiction and ghost stories and is currently working on a novel.