Dark Matter (31 page)

His thoughts drifted back to earth to the
book in his hands. He flipped it open to the first page, needlessly. His eyes
scanned the first line. He read aloud: “A truth universally acknowledged,” and
wondered how many of those there were.

Staring at the phrase, he bent his mind
around it with the slightest effort, cupped it in his attention with a squint
that didn’t touch his eyes. Letters wriggled under the pressure, and exchanged
places to form a new sequence:
Austen wrecked lavatory dunghill.

“Profound, Rasputin,” he said into the
mid-morning silence.

A knock at the door startled him. He fought
himself a moment over whether to answer or lay low. His conscience won. He
found Dee standing on the mat outside the door wearing an apologetic look,
which had become habitual.

“I’m not going in today,” he said.

“I’m not picking you up. I thought we could
hang out.”

“Don’t you have work?” he said, eyeing the
large book tucked under her arm. Dee seemed unable to move about the world
without taking some part of it with her.

“My rats were wiped out by a disease.”

“Ironic.”

“It’s not funny, Monk. That’s a month of
work.”

“Sorry. Come on in.”

She stepped past him, allowing him to see
that what he had thought was a book was a photo album.

She turned to him, her nose wrinkled.

“It’s pretty ripe in here. When did you
guys last clean?”

“Clean?” he said, knowing Jordy would cop
the lecture despite being the hygienic one.

“What are you reading?”

He held Pride and Prejudice up for her to
read the cover.

“Not reading, as such.”

The wrinkle jumped from her nose to between
her brows.

“Juggling, then?”

He walked back into the front room and sat
again with his back to the window. She followed and sat across from him. He
flipped the book back open to the first page.

“I was playing a game. I pick a sentence or
phrase and anagram-ise it.”

“Is this a nerd thing?”

“Look,” he said, and ran a finger over the
phrase in the opening sentence. “This has the anagram—” he said, and paused to
mind-squint at the text. The words wriggled and regrouped again with a
different result: “Vowed Austen, lethargically drunk.”

The knot between Dee’s brows thickened
before it released and she smiled.

“You’re kidding.”

He shrugged.

Dee dug into her bag and found a loose
receipt and pen. She turned the receipt over and copied out the original phrase
and the anagram, and then began to work her way through the phrase, letter by
letter, crossing each off when she found it in the anagram. When she had struck
through the last pair of d’s, she looked up.

“That’s cool! How long did it take you to
work that out?”

He grunted dismissively, and warped the
phrase again: “Austen: Vocally wrinkled daughter.”

She bent over the receipt to check the
anagram, but evidently thought better of it when she caught his eye.

“How long a phrase can you do?”

“Don’t know. It’s not exactly useful,
though, is it. Maybe a notch above belching the alphabet.”
 He looked at the
text and warped it one last time, spoke the result: “Crude, unloving, wry:
Death takes all.” Yes, there was a candidate for a truth universally
acknowledged.

He looked up and was surprised to find
tears in Dee’s eyes, shimmering in the frail light. She put the paper and pen
down, and lifted the photo album into her lap. She set one hand to the edge of
the cover, but sat poised, as though steeling herself to plunge into icy water.

“Your dad?” he probed. She nodded, drew a
deep breath, and folded the cover open with such reverence, he guessed it was
the first time she had looked at it since her father’s death. He set a guard
over his tongue.

The album’s hinge complained as she lay it
flat. He imagined she had opened his coffin.

He watched in silence as her gaze wandered
over the first page. She pulled a handkerchief from her bag and blew her nose
into it wetly. He studied the ceiling where cracks in the paint radiated from a
water damage stain. He remembered the summer storm that had caused it by
filling the gutters too fast. He had sat at the same window in darkness and
watched lightning connect earth and sky again and again, a message without
content but full of power.

Dee stirred.

He said quietly, “Why are you torturing
yourself?”

“It’s not torture,” she said. “Don’t you
ever feel the need to draw off a little poison? Grief is a kind of poison.”

“What is that photo, there,” he said, and
touched its corner. The photo was shot into the sun, silhouetting a man and two
girls against lush heath and the arc of a craggy bay.

“Us holidaying in Albany. We were always
there in summer, but have precious few photos of Dad. He was usually behind the
camera.”

“Do you ever go down there?”

“You mean to holiday? No. I visited once,
just once. We must have spent the best part of seven summer holidays there. It
was tempting to hope, having spent so much time there, that the place would be
imbued with a little of him. That the pavement might have taken the imprint of
his thongs, the caravan park a little of his smell, or the locals the rub of
his character.” Her finger touched the man’s silhouette. “But I found none of
that. The tourist crowd swells and ebbs each season, and has no memory of its
own. Even the locals eventually fall out of orbit into the bigger cities.”

She turned the page.

“Going back was a mistake. I came home with
less. I only found what I already knew, that what I’d enjoyed as a girl was the
people, to be there with my family, with Dad. It wouldn’t have mattered where
we were. The substance was the warm bodies nearby, the pick-up games, the cuts
and sunburn, the Milky Way, and the laughter of board games played well past
bedtime. It’s just a town now that doesn’t know me.”

His heart ached. Her tears had dried, but
her voice had become distant. Drawing poison, she’d called it; it felt more
like vomiting it up. He rued answering the door, and then, in the time it took
for the thought to flash across his mind, felt guilty. He buckled down and
resolved to ride it out with her.

She turned another page, and her sudden
laughter banished the shadow that had gathered over him.

“I remember this,” she said, and angled the
book to afford him a better view. He took a moment to interpret the scene. Her
dad occupied most of the photo. A camera obscured his face. He appeared to be
taking a photo of himself in a bathroom mirror. His brown arms, winging out to
either side of his face while they propped the camera before his eye,
contrasted with the pallor of his naked torso, which was relieved only by a
scribble of chest hair. Above his head sat a white towel, which hugged his
scalp and spiralled up to a point that had folded under its own weight.

“He said he was a soft-serve ice-cream. He
thought he was so clever.”

She flipped through more pages, pausing to
pore over each and comment. Rasputin watched her as much as the picture show.
Her face was a shifting study of the tracks of human emotion. Each photo she
scanned summoned an immediate echo of the event in her expression, which then played
out in changing nuance as she recalled the event and explored its nooks and
crannies. The tears came again, as often as not, but he thought he detected
tension leave her frame.

He couldn’t help contrast the number of
photos Dee had of her father with the lone touchstone he had of his sister.

Without meaning to, he began calling up her
memory.

It came slowly, first with the cry of gulls
invading the quiet room. He drew it near without taking his attention from Dee
and the photo album. The room remained dark and still, while the sensation of a
breeze began to play up and down his arms, and midday sun kissed his skin, over
his arms, and beneath his jeans. Its warmth finally pulled his attention away
from Dee. He only realised when her question broke through to him: “Monk, are
you okay?”

“No seizures,” he whispered. “It seems some
part of me believes in your poison therapy.”

“Can I,” she said, hesitant, “Can I come
with you?”

“Please.”

She slipped a hand over his and squeezed it
once. With that skin to skin contact as an anchor in the real world, he let
himself fall into the blooming memory.

“Can you tell me what you’re seeing?” she
said, sounding both far-off and near.

“A Falcon station-wagon. Its tyre wells are
spattered with mud. We must’ve been on unsealed roads,” he said, then realised
he was only noting what was new since he had last explored the memory. He began
again. “I’m at a beach. The surf is pounding, and the sea is stirred up. There’s
a line of white water out there. It must be breaking over a reef.”

“Is it a town beach?”

“I don’t know. I can’t just turn around.
Memories from when I was a kid are...” he paused, groping for the right word,
“disjointed, like your photo album. And worse, many are blurred or skewed, or
like they’re under-developed. I don’t just mean the sights, either. Sounds too.
Everything is like that—”

He broke off. His sister ran behind him,
down the grassy shoulder of the beach, off the lip and into the sand. He felt
the bluster of her motion pass across his shoulders, and he turned in time to
see her look back.

“My sister. She has...green eyes, like me.
And she’s missing a front tooth, but it doesn’t hurt her smile. She’s calling
me: Tintin.”

His toddler’s reaction, delayed, was to
turn to her. A giggle bubbled out of his throat and he began clumsily to chase
her.

“We’re playing a game,” he said. “I’m
trying to catch her.” Suddenly a view of the beach opened wide. It was strewn
with people. Metres from the car a family clustered under an umbrella. He didn’t
recognise anyone.

The view faded to black and was replaced
for a moment with a pure sensation of dizziness. He was chasing his sister
around the car, and this was not the first circuit.

“I’m in the car,” he said, his voice
falling to a whisper. “I think I’m looking for her.” But it was hard to tell.
Time had slowed. He was on all fours in the passenger seat, and children were
visible through the open driver’s side doorway, taking an eternity to cross the
gap. The sharp cries of the gulls had dropped octaves to become long, low howls;
it was a pack of wolves out there, on the hunt.

A final, static image appeared before he
felt the first, familiar wave of disorientation, of screaming, assault him
again. It was of the car’s handbrake, depressed to the floor, and, closed over
its shaft, his hand.

His mind turned and ran from the memory as
though from a primed bomb.

He opened his eyes, but the memory clung to
him like nightmare.

He looked at his hand, the one still
enclosed by Dee’s. He yanked it free and stared at it.

“You’re sweating,” Dee said. “What is it?”
She tried to take his hand again, but he snatched it away. “What did you see?”

“I... She...” he began, then fell silent.
He balled his hand into a fist, then extended his index and middle fingers. He
walked them over his drawn-up knees. “I was chasing her around the car, I think—hard
to piece it together.”

Dee nodded, coaxing.

“She must’ve been out of sight too long,”
he said. “I crawled through the car”—his fingers crouched and slowed—“maybe
thinking she was in there, maybe trying to cut her off on the other side...”

Dee kept nodding, but his fingers stopped.
He couldn’t get them moving again.

“What happened in the car, Monk?” she said.
“Was she there? Was she sick?”

“No, no,” he said, and examined his hand
again. He curled his fingers around the imaginary shaft of a handbrake lever
and mimed dropping it. Her face wore an expression of confusion, but he
continued to lift the lever and drop it, lift and drop, as though he were
playing charades with an imagination run dry. The deadlock held until she
suddenly sat back. Her pupils had nearly eclipsed her irises.

“The
handbrake
?” she said.

“Me. I must have disengaged it, and—”

She came forward, grabbed him by the
shoulders, and said in a rush: “No. Don’t go there. You don’t know that. Did
you actually see yourself do it?” He shook his head. “Then it could have been
anyone—
anyone
Monk—or anything. It may have broken. Or maybe it was
someone else. There must have been plenty of people around. Maybe the brake had
nothing to do with it.”

(
The car rolled, just a foot, and
stopped
)

He nodded at her words, smiled, and tasted
salt on his lips. He felt a perverse need to comfort her. She looked so small
and weak.