She leaves before I decide to ask her to stay. I hear the door click shut and her heels clack away. I lie there with my eyes half closed telling myself I’m still asleep. I pull her pillow close to me and try to paint her in its scent. When she’s asleep I talk about myself. I find things I couldn’t see during the day and lay them end to end at the start of her dreams. I miss her then. She always wakes before I do. I lie there with my eyes half open, hoping she will stay.
Driving along in Colt’s rattly old Valiant which he never fixes but says is a classic, on the way to nowhere for a hide and seek party. We fall into a rhythm of bitumen and telephone poles, the radio gnawing its way through static and garbled golden oldies under Colt’s relentless scanning. I roll the window down and fly my hand in the wind, my hair whipping around my face. I close my eyes and feel the air rushing against my palm, pushing its way through my fingers, chasing the sun as I pitch my hand into the sky.
The girl just shrugs her shoulders, her blank face flickering blue-black in the television glare. A blender whirs and churns under the touch of a middle aged shopping network Barbie doll, its virtues diced into ticker traffic bulletins that flow like river flotsam across the bottom of the screen. The girl stares, unseeing, unmoved by the Barbie’s ministrations. I can see the failures of her life welling up behind her glassy eyes like aquarium lobsters waiting to die. I reach my hand out to her and she whimpers softly, though I’m not even sure she knows I’m there.
They stare at the painting, faded acrylic pushed against bare red brick. A tiny boat in an ocean scene, still within a squall. They follow it, he towards serenity and her into its maw. The threat of storms. Her voice lowered in the light but shedding its own upon the room. He watches her silently with time rimed eyes, propped up in bed as though king of a soiled throne, while she gathers up her clothes and hangs them on her frame. She can feel him tugging at each of the strings of self-consciousness tied to her body.
I nearly got stabbed last night. Is it still a stabbing if they only cut you? The guy standing there, slashing his knife around in the air. I had to throw the bag of weed at him. I run past him while he fumbles with the bag and the knife, nearly breaking my neck on the mess of ethernet cables and pizza boxes living the hall. I pull myself up and run through the lounge screaming, it’s a bust! My deadbeat brother sits there in rigor mortis bong grip, watching me with dead eyes and that sadistic grin of his.
Ambrose lay outside the door, waiting quietly to be let in. He had no idea how long had he been there but it felt like forever. It was so cold outside. The rain was strumming its first few chords against the chill pavement while the wind blew its vicious beats against the windows of the house. There was something coming for him, he could sense it. It made his shoulders tense and the hair on the back of his neck stand up. A lifetime of instinct told him to flee, to hide, to get as far away as possible before it found him. I should run he thought. Something made him stay.
This is a safe place Ambrose thought, I’ll be safe inside. He looked around him at the familiar surroundings. The deck and the banister of the old Queenslander home, the faded couch he’d spent so many summer afternoons on, passing the time in the sun. It all looked so foreign in the dark. He snorted defiantly and tucked his head against his chest.
A flash of lighting over the horizon made him shiver. It wouldn’t be safe out here much longer. He had to get inside. Ambrose knocked gently against the door. Nothing was stirring on the other side. The house was silent. Whimpering softly Ambrose lowered his head again and closed his eyes. It was useless, he wasn’t coming. Ambrose had spent his whole life with the man inside and now here he was, alone in the dark.
Thunder boomed in the distance and Ambrose let loose another whimper. He had to try again, he couldn’t give up now. He rapped again at the door, his limbs shaking with fear and urgency. Desperately, he scratched at the door, forcing himself against it with all his strength. He was almost screaming now, a hopeless howl torn loose from his throat and lost to the wind. The door stood strong against his attack as the thunder clapped mockingly at his efforts. His body shook and his throat ran hoarse with his guttural shouts.
From the depths of the house a light flickered into life. Ambrose ceased his assault and listened hopefully to the soft patter of feet approaching the door. Despite his fear Ambrose could feel a lightness enter him. This was it, any moment now and he would be safe.
Andrew was dreaming of the ocean when the noise woke him. All that banging and bustle on the porch, it had to be Ambrose. He pulled a loose cotton robe around his shoulders and started towards the front door.
‘Every time,’ Andrew muttered to himself. ‘It’s just a damned storm, Brosie. Nothing to be scared of.’ He pushed open the door and looked down at the silhouette of his dog huddled on the porch. ‘Come on, get inside you big wuss,’ he said.
Ambrose unfolded himself slowly from the ground and looked up sheepishly. He trotted past the man and into the hall, his tail wagging happily.
Andrew shut the door behind them. ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘You can sleep in my room.’
She sits on the sand letting the wind play with her hair, waiting for meaning to wash in on the tide. The dusky sun shines its half hearted rays around her feet, too concerned with keeping its head above the horizon to worry about others. Its light has no bite. She digs a soft, slender fingered hand into the sand and imagines its future. Glass, a vase, tall and slim, filled with tulips arranged with delicate precision. She pulls her hand free from the silt. Tiny grains cling to the moisture on her skin like a sandpaper glove. This is what it feels like to be alive she thinks.
As the sun relents, a silver sheen overtakes the waves and coats the beach. A chill sneaks quietly across the sand like the breath of the moon, asking the girl to pull her shawl tighter around her shoulders. It’s getting late she thinks, I should be getting home. I should be doing something. With a sigh, a perfect pitch to match the moon, she slumps her shoulders and falls back into the sand.
‘No,’ she sighs, ‘I won’t go.’
There’s no need. I make my own rules. My own choices, life. I make my own life.
‘I make my own damn it.’
The moon settles in its arc and looks down passively at the girl. The wind has stopped playing with her hair, finding fancy building banks of sand against her skin instead. Like a shipwrecked relic, the elements do their best to reshape her. Rivulets of sand trickle across her torso and form islands in the folds of her clothes. Grain after grain it marches and mounds against her body. She digs her fingers into the sand and grasps at its embrace.
‘You know me,’ she whispers, ‘because I’m part of you.’
I remember watching Ikky sink and thinking I should do something, that I should be able to help, to stop it, to save her. I was never able to save her. I used to watch her playing with Dash in the orchards in summer. They’d come out for the harvests when the mangos were ripe, we all came out. It was tradition. Ikky would lift Dash onto her shoulders and he would pass the mangos down to her to fill their baskets. Every now and again Ikky would lower Dash to the ground and they’d spread themselves in the shade for a break. I remember how she used to look at those times. She always wore her hair in a high braid, the kind that wraps around the back of a girls head. I remember one year she wore a dress made of pure cotton, white and red. I thought she looked like an angel, the light playing around her braid like a halo of gold. It was unbearable to look at her sometimes, and even worse not to. Mother would curse a streak at me for my share of dropped mangos, unusually high when Ikky was about.
I don’t think Ikky ever knew I was watching her, not how I was watching her, but occasionally she would see me looking, staring like an idiot, and smile. My heart would skip like a rogue butterfly and I’d let loose another mango from my hands. She was so beautiful and so far away. Maybe it was better that way, maybe she was better that way. I used to think that if I touched her, if my hands, these callused dirty paws on the ends of my wrists, if my hands ever touched her skin she would spoil. I thought I was unworthy. I knew I was beneath her. But how badly I had wanted her, any and all of her.
When I heard Ikky was to be married I could hardly move. I remember Mother took me as sick and sent me to bed, my supper cold and untouched at the table. I lay there unable to close my eyes, breathing only out of stubborn habit. My body wouldn’t let me die as much as I had wanted it to. My angel, my untouchable angel was to be given body and soul to another man, and worse, infinitely worse, she had wanted to be his.
Carlos was a brute. He had always been a brute. When we were young Carlos and I would play with the other children in the fields behind the tar pits. The simple games of childhood, imaginary and safe, though Carlos was never content with safety. I think to myself now that Carlos was simply never content. I remember one day while we were playing he got it into his mind to dare poor Vim to brave the tar. Vim was the youngest of us, the runt we used to say, always biting at our ankles. The older children, myself included, would take turns walking into the tar, as far as we could manage and back again before we were stuck. We never let Vim take a turn, he was too little, too scared, too likely to panic. To Carlos, this just made him sport. He taunted Vim, jeering at him, calling him names. We all joined him, none of us wanted to lose favour with the brute who could so easily torment.
I remember the knots in my stomach as Vim took his first step out onto the tar, his arms raised from his sides to balance his weight. I wished for him to make it out, and more to make it back. If he cried now or backed out Carlos would never let him forget it. Vim took his first step and faltered, I could see he was scared, we all could. It didn’t stop Carlos though, his taunts just grew to match Vim’s hesitation. I think now that Vim kept walking simply to escape Carlos and his jeers.
Vim was too far out before I knew something was wrong. His steps were coming too far apart, taking too long. I could see his feet. The tar clung to his soles too readily, too greedily. I yelled for him to come back, to turn around. I remember thinking he was too far out to hear me, that the tar ate my words as easily as Vim’s footsteps. The other Children were silent, even Carlos. I told them to run back to the village and get help. They fled, happy to be away from the sight of Vim and his sinking determination. I remember standing there beside Carlos, unable to move, unable to help. I remember looking at Carlos as the tar ate what little remained of Vim’s innocence. His face was like stone, cold and passive. I had expected there to be horror there, or shame, or regret. I had expected something to be there, but there was nothing. I saw the same look on Carlos’ face on the day he and Ikky were married.
I turned my eyes from the brute and sent them out over the pit. There was nothing to see now. Nothing to hear but the faint bubble and grumble as the tar settled its stomach. The heat coming towards us from the middle of the pit did little to warm the chill that had taken hold of my body. By the time the adults arrived it was too late. Vim was gone and so was Carlos’ humanity.
I remember watching Ikky sink and thinking of Vim, thinking that I should be able to help now where I could not back then. I remember thinking that she was right. Ikky did what she had to do to escape, just as Vim had.
The hourglass exhausts itself and I turn it on its head. I watch the sand rerun, the grains tumbling over each other, erratically uniform, building a mountain out of moments from the past.
I can hear music.
Supine, Marion tells me, it’s supposed to be hot.
I watch the time drain away.
She lifts her arm into the air, palm up as though cupping a ball. ‘We should go to the beach,’ she says.
I tell her the salt sticks to my skin, that I feel granular.
Insular on the couch, Marion is silent, flexing her fingers around the ball.
I count the grains a second at a time.
‘Only, when it’s hot,’ she offers, ‘you should be somewhere that feels hot.’
I tell her that it should feel hot in hell, that she’ll be comfortable there, and watch the ball explode between her fingers.
How many grains in an hour, I say
Marion drops her arm over the back of the couch and pulls herself up. There’s a crease running down the side of her face from the way she was lying. I don’t say anything. She looks at me and scowls, the crease unyielding.
‘Science,’ she says, as though that were the end of it. The scowl slides away and she fits a smile in its place. ‘Take me out.’
Like a hitman, I say, and the smile doesn’t fit anymore.
She disconnects her arm and lets herself fall back. I hear her sigh float up to the ceiling. ‘Are you bored?’ she asks me.
I tell her no, I can’t think of a better way to pass time.
A stale piece of popcorn launches itself over the couch’s fabric ramparts. It misses me and lands on the table. I look from the popcorn to the hourglass. Grains.
‘I want to see the sun,’ the couch tells me. ‘I want to lie in the sun.’
We’ll never get you out, I say.
‘If you don’t take me,’ she says with the cadence of a threat but none of the potency, ‘I’ll take myself.’
I get up and stand behind the couch, looking down at Marion.
Why don’t you move?
Kate had her serious face on. The one she gets when she thinks she has something important to say. It’s funny actually, I can always see it coming. First she goes very quiet, then her lips set themselves together while she works out exactly how to say it. When she’s ready she’ll tilt her head down and look over the top of her glasses in just the right way. I always thought she should have been a librarian.
‘You should quit smoking,’ Kate said.
We were sitting in my bedroom. Well, the room where all my stuff was living anyway. Technically I’d been there for a year, but I hadn’t been able to settle. It was my parents’ house, and I just couldn’t make it mine. I was sitting on the edge of the bed in front of the computer, rolling a cigarette. When we first started seeing each other I was so nervous about smoking in front of her, she doesn’t smoke and she always knows exactly what her opinions are. Apparently smoking is bad for you. We both got more used to the idea though. I started smoking less and she told me I was dying less.
‘But I like it so much’ I said and pushed my bottom lip out in a mock pout
‘Yeah and it’s killing you’ she said.
‘Slowly though, I’ve still got plenty of time left.’
‘You have all the time in the world until it runs out.’
‘Runs out where?’
‘Out of time, dickhead.’
‘I’m not going to run out. I bought in bulk,’ I said, exercising my perverse sense of humour. I always enjoyed arguing with her.
‘Don’t be a smart ass, I’m really worried. You’ve been smoking so much lately.’
‘Yeah but I haven’t been drinking as much,’ I said. It was true, I hadn’t been drinking as much, but only because I hadn’t been able to afford it. So far the cigarettes were winning.
‘Well, that’s good because you drink like an idiot.’
‘I’d like to think I drink more like an alcoholic fish.’
‘You think you’re funny don’t you.’
‘Somebody has to, otherwise all my jokes would go to waste.’
‘You’re going to waste.’ Kate sighs, ‘How much do you weigh these days?’
‘What’s that got to do with my drinking?’ I said. I always hated when she brought up my weight and she knew that.
‘Nothing. It has to do with your body not being able to run off cigarettes and sandwiches.’
‘Not even tasty grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato and stuff?’ I said trying to get her off the track.
‘Nope, not even the tastiest of sandwiches.’
‘What about all the yeast in beer?’ I offer. ‘Do you know how many calories alcohol actually has?’
‘Not enough to live off obviously,’ She moves a lock of hair away from her glasses and tucks it behind her ear, ‘and cigarettes are sugar free.’
‘So there shouldn’t be a problem with me smoking then.’
‘At this point sugar would be good for you.’
‘Awesome, cause I’ve been eating a heap of candy lately.’
‘And that’s why your teeth are going to hell. You need to put something more substantial in you,’ Kate said, fixing me with her quiet in the library face.
‘Do you want me to put something substantial in you?’
‘Like the sense of satisfaction I’d get from convincing you to be healthy and treat your body better?’
‘Nah, I was thinking more like my-’
‘I know what you were thinking,’ she said sharply, ‘and I don’t know how you even have the energy.’
‘Milo,’ I said plainly, ‘is slow burning energy you know.’
Kate grunted, ‘Do you know how frustrating you are?’
I looked at her calmly, I could tell she wasn’t really angry, there was a smile hiding at the corners of her mouth. ‘Is it anything like trying to get the lid of a jar of pickles or something, but the lid just won’t come off, so you get a tea towel and wrap that around it, trying to get a better grip, but that doesn’t work so finally you just pry at it with a knife until the knife breaks and you decide to eat something else? Is it anything like that?’
I could tell I had won when she smiled.
‘Kind of,’ she said. ‘Except that I can’t eat anything else, I’ve already chosen my meal and I have to stick with it’
‘Is it pancakes? Cause they’re really tasty you know. I like mine with lemon juice and sugar’
Kate groaned into her palm.
‘What’s the matter babe? Are you a syrup girl?’
I dreamt I was a cowboy last night. You were there. It was like a Hollywood cliché with a sterilized bent; in Technicolor. I wore a gun at my hip and my hat cocked askew. You wore a ribbon in your hair and a lurid red petticoat affair, with just a hint of garter and hem.
I fought bandits and scoundrels, and scandalized as much as either might. At night I took you roses. You refused to swoon without a searing parody of my advances. I persisted and insisted and persevered. You were adored.
By day the bandits came. Quietly at first; not one of us heard them arrive. They made out for the bank, but not one of them left it alive. I went in with my gun at my hip and my hat cocked askew.
They barked at me, demands, indignations and torments, or so they thought. But they held no glamour on me. This day I was blind to their leers, my mind’s eye struck with other visions. This day I was deaf to their jeers, my ear serenaded by midnight whispers. This day I fought with my heart.
Visions of red, scarlet, garter and hem, danced in front of me and lead my hands. One by one the bandits fell, while bullets rattled around me. Faint glimmers of steel, distant and harmless. I was invincible while you danced in my head. You were incredible.
Gritting his teeth, he watched it draw closer. Watched the monstrosity drag itself across the cold linoleum floor. Watched it working at words through a palpating mess of blood and gore, what once was a mouth. He listened. A raspy hiss, a sound like cutter but more familiar, slurred and husky, sickeningly percussed by a slippery snick of teeth on bone. It was trying to say his name. He tightened his grip, shut his eyes and brought the axe down hard against his wife’s freckled neck, a mottled target. ‘I’ll always love you, Sunshine,’ he whispered into the silence.
‘Can you believe its been a year?’ she purrs, regal
in candle flickering illumination, sublimating scene,
back arched, cast in relief, an exotic shadow dream.
Acquiescence breeds. Settling, she posits,
‘Poor thing, under siege. Twelve months with me
can’t have been-’
easy tenure, I assure her.
We swap smiles like campfire tales
in the flame lit blanket wilderness
and hold each other for warmth.
I run into Caroline outside Wicks office and she won’t shut up about some band she saw on the weekend. I’m told they’re named after a dinosaur and have almost a dozen members. The coolest part, she’s telling me, is how the lineup keeps changing but the band stays together, brought to life by the music.
Caroline talks the way a house fire burns.
I suppress a yawn as the oxygen around me dies. I can’t concentrate. A group of high school girls walk past. It’s hard to tell where one starts and another stops, they’re indistinguishable but for the colour of their clothes, like watching a slutty rainbow slink across the sky.
I’m thinking about killing myself.
There’s a jab in my ribs and Caroline asks me if I’m listening. I look at her and try absently to focus. I tell her, of course, that I was just trying to imagine how cool that must be, all those people.
‘Oh, you have no idea,’ she says.
I point at the pack of smokes she’s holding and raise my eyebrow. She draws two out and slips me one without missing a beat. ‘I mean they play this really cool mix of old school surf rock and instrumetal, but it has this really heavy indie twist to it. It’s like, if Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Beach Boys had a baby, and then Muse fed the baby to Sigur Ros. I mean, it’s just incredible you know. I can’t believe you weren’t there.’
I want to get out of this conversation, but she doesn’t leave me any spaces. I nod slowly and light our cigarettes.
‘The lead singer, Tony, we kind of know each other from around, you know. Well, he was completely making eyes at me the whole time. I’m pretty sure he has a girlfriend, but it can’t be that serious if he’s making eyes at me right? Anyway, I saw her out one time and she wasn’t even that cute. I’m way cuter right?’
In my head I’m imagining a bottle of red wine, something vintage, and a bottle of valium. The note I leave next to my bed reads: This isn’t a good enough reason to stay.
Caroline flicks her cigarette into the planter behind us. ‘I have to go,’ she says. ‘I have to meet Jessie over at Caxton and then we’re going to some cider bar he heard about. I’m sure he thinks it’s cool, but I don’t even drink cider and he knows that. If he wasn’t so good in bed I swear I wouldn’t bother. You know what I mean?’
I have no idea. The words seem to make sense, but I can’t decipher them. I nod and tell her I’m meeting Dylan in the valley. She throws her arms around me and brushes her lips lightly against my cheek.
After she’s gone, I stand there and count my breaths.
Underneath all his hair, Dr. Wicks looks like some kind of rat, twitchy, nervous and cunning. He’s okay, I guess, but he’s a total hippiecrit. He keeps shoving all these affirmations at me, telling me about the power of belief. I can, if I believe I can, sort of thing. He still charges me by the hour.
I’m reading the spines on Wicks’ bookshelf. Most of the titles sound vaguely pornographic and I’m thinking about masturbating, only half listening to what he’s saying. I grunt inquisitively and look up. He’s got this, We’re both on the same team, look on his face that really grinds me for some reason.
‘Why don’t you know how the story ends?’ He says.
‘I haven’t made my mind up yet if they die or not. It’s the same either way really. I mean, in my mind, both have already happened. It doesn’t matter if they live or die, because both are true. So nothing happens.’
I can tell he doesn’t get it.
Wicks looks out at me from the underbrush of his eyebrows and twitches his nose. ‘Let’s talk about something else for a bit, hey?’
I don’t want to talk about something else. I don’t want to talk about anything really. I feel so tired.
‘I feel so tired.’ I say.
‘How are you tired Jonah?’
I sigh and don’t tell him. Questions like that really fuck me off. They’re meaningless little probes designed to open me up, but all they do is get under my skin. Wicks just sits there companionably, twitching his nose and darting his eyes at the notebook on his lap. The silence in the room itches at my skin.
A Few Short Words 