Like a House on Fire (13 page)

‘See, you can reduce all this to just a system of binaries,' I remember him explaining when he showed me how the computer was programmed. ‘Just infinite combinations of zero and one.' I wonder if he understands that better now, struggling home in the middle of the pack. How it feels to be rendered, finally, to those low-resolution dots of shadow and light, a conglomeration made up of nothing and one.

‘Getting fit how?' demands Julie from work when she rings. ‘Volleyball? Aerobics?'

No, I tell her, I need something bigger, more of a challenge. I'm just going to start out with light jogging, then join some kind of club. Some kind of running club.

‘Running? Are you serious?'

‘Sure. I'm going out today to buy the shoes.'

There's a short film looping in my head and, in it, I'm pounding easily along over a hilltop in an interclub event. I'm not even puffing as I overtake him, despite the spurt he puts on. He glances sideways; he sees it's me. I flash him a surprised-yet-calm smile of recognition, a flutter of the fingers, and pull away. Later, at the picnic, I'll turn when he approaches, and let that awkward moment stretch out. In some versions, I have a little trouble placing him, so that there's the slightest hesitation before I say his name. Then I ask him how his thesis is going, and watch his face fall.

Any day now, I think as I lie heavy as a stone under the quilt, I'll go out and buy those shoes.

From the thin stack of discarded CDs, I pull out the country-and-western collection a girl group sold us one night at the pub. They were great, those girls. Big hair and pointy boots and, up close, plenty of in-your-face eyeliner and juicy-fruit lipstick as they laughed and signed my CD. He hadn't liked them, though. Didn't like the venue (too smoky), didn't like the audience (nobody there to converse with about Thesis), didn't even feel comfortable ordering a couple of beers at the bar. All twitchy about the two guys playing pool, the ones who might have even had a dance with me or at least found it in themselves to relax and enjoy some live music.

‘You're not playing that Tammy Wynette Hormone Band again, are you?' he'd say when he came out of the study, irritable and peaky, mind on higher things. ‘Jesus, it's like three cats being strangled.'

I put them on now and hear that mandolin, their harmonies start up.
The high lonesome sound
, they'd called it in the song's intro, as I'd smiled apologetically at the guys at the pool table while one of them held out a cue to me and raised his eyebrows, that smile never leaving his face. I'd shaken my head. High lonesome, and high and dry, standing there with a guy who checked his watch every three minutes and coughed pointedly all the way home.

Oh, I'm too far gone
, they sing now through the speakers as I turn up the treble and fiddle with the volume.
I know I've loved you too much for too long, but I'm too far gone.

Take care, Rebecca
, they'd written on the CD cover when I'd handed over my twenty bucks,
and enjoy!
Take care — that's good advice. Like all the revelatory news I've received over the last three months, all the bombshells —
I'm leaving
, say, or the doctor's blunt,
You're depressed
— it comes in a handy two-word dispatch, so there's no excuse for not paying attention.

What are they doing now, those girls, I wonder. Not surfing the web all night eating two-minute noodles in a pair of stretched tracksuit pants, I'll bet. When they'd sung those words, they'd sounded sincerely sorrowful, but their cowboy hats and red fingernails had said otherwise. They'll be fast asleep, ready to rise late and meet each other for breakfast at a street cafe, wearing sunglasses, wondering whether to have the hash browns or the bacon.

All I need to do is get up, wash my hair and dress and go to the mall to buy the shoes, and I can get started. I need that torso tight as a rubber band, my number tied and flapping across my chest, my shapely arms working like pistons as I make him eat my dust. That's the main thing.

What do you actually do in a cross-country run? I have a hazy picture of splashing across streams and jumping fallen logs, slogging up muddy hillsides and crashing down the other side through rugged bush. Climbing racks of tyres bound together with rope. No, wait — that's the army. Do you follow a system of flags, or does someone give you a map? Do they start you off with the crack of a gunshot, abrupt as a slap in the face or the slamming of a door?

I wonder too if there's a back-up vehicle, some support staff who tail-gun the runners, just in case you fall into a puddle or a ditch and lie there overwhelmed with the pointlessness of it all, the ludicrous challenge you've imposed on yourself; your foolish, desperate need for purpose. I imagine being lifted from the dirt by kind hands, and given a bottle of Gatorade and a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. Oh, I would give in without even a pretence of fighting spirit if someone offered to drive me to the finish line. Who wouldn't?

I'm shaken from this reverie by a phone call from my boss, ringing me to remind me that my sick leave has run out and I need to return to work the following Monday. Until now I've let his calls go through to the answering machine. This time I finally lift the receiver.

‘How are the stress levels?' he says. All casual. ‘Getting plenty of sleep?'

‘I was dozing when you rang, actually.'

‘Good on you. That sounds like just what the doctor ordered.'

No. What the doctor ordered is still an unfilled prescription in my wallet as I self-medicate with net-surfing and the Tammy Wynette Hormone Band. I wander into the study as he talks, my fingers absently, lovingly, grazing the keyboard of the computer. Double-click on the internet icon, go straight to the club site. Last week's results are posted, and there he is, placed forty-second now. A nagging cold, maybe. Slipping down the ladder into numb mediocrity, driving back to his new beachside apartment to sit slumped on the new Ikea sofa and wonder bleakly whether he should open a couple of those cardboard boxes, pull out the old photos from where he's hidden them, and then, and then … swallow his pride to pick up the phone. He'll ring late, sheepish and sad, voice thick with tears. Ask me if I feel like some Thai takeaway, or just a bottle of wine. If we could talk. It seems so possible, so likely, I feel my throat tighten in anticipation.

‘Rebecca? Hello?' My boss is still on the line.

‘I'm here,' I say. ‘Monday morning, then.'

‘We're all looking forward to having you back.'

‘I'll bring in something for morning tea,' I say.

So what I'm going to do, I'm thinking, since I have every right to, nothing to do with him, is ring the club and ask about joining. I'm looking for a phone number I can try, and I refresh the screen and start again.

It's amazing, isn't it, the level to which we'll invent what we need. I'm actually expecting that phone call, the high lonesome sound I'm certain will come, from a man beaten into remorse and resignation after a day's cross-country running.

I've convinced myself of it, despite knowing that he hated sport so much — it's coming back to me now — that he couldn't even bring himself to pick up a cricket bat at a family barbeque in all the time we were together. Couldn't jump up and have a good-natured hit, couldn't have a simple game of pool, couldn't bear ever doing anything he wasn't an expert at. The portal opens, and his name is listed again, his beloved, lost, unique name, but I suddenly notice that this list is headed by a title I've somehow missed on the cached page.

Just two small words again, going off in a blinding flash like a grenade. What they say is:
Under-fourteens
.

I sit staring at them, dully open-mouthed. It's like being doused with a sheet of muddy water, like a final jarring stumble on wrenched ankles. I take in a gulped breath at the sensation of some huge gaping distance being covered, a long stretch of terrain rushed through with a whiplash jerk, and then, as it all skids to a halt, my face cools as if raised to a merciful and unexpected breeze.

Click on the icon, close the screen.
Windows is shutting down
. I almost hear it, the decisive thud as it hits some imagined sill somewhere. I need a shower, and then I need a long cold drink of something at an outdoor table, but first I linger, watching the innocuous sky-blue screen. I'm waiting for the little melody it always plays before it sighs and switches itself off, that melancholy minor-key tune that tells you that whatever you've been watching, ready or not, it's time to roll the credits.

Sleepers

Ray was stuck in traffic, an unusual feeling in a town the size of his, inching forward through a detour round the railway crossing. He watched the orange text changing on the roadside electronic billboard in the lethargic kind of trance he'd felt himself lapsing into more and more recently.
TRACK
UPGRADE
,
he read.
DELAYS EXPECTED. DETOUR AHEAD.

He'd forgotten — they all had. Barrelled up to the intersection into town as usual to find the contractors had been hard at it from 6 a.m. just as they'd promised, a squadron of shining earthmovers and excavators hacking away already. Thousands of dollars being spent every minute by whatever construction company had won the tender. Not anyone local, that's for sure. Ray might have had some contract work himself, then.

Up ahead, a guy in reflector sunnies, fluoro vest and hard hat was propped next to a
STOP/SLOW
sign.

‘That's gotta be the easiest money in the world,' Ray's girlfriend Sharon had said to him once in the car as they waited at some roadworks. Ex-girlfriend. Having a dig at him, Ray had thought, because he'd done a stint himself on a road crew the summer before.

‘Not always,' he'd answered, knowing it wouldn't do any good, but weighing in anyway. ‘Some motorists, they just get out of the car and king-hit you, because they're sick of waiting. Two blokes have been run over deliberately, just holding signs like that.'

She'd given him a look. ‘That'd be why you get the extra loading, is it? Danger money?'

‘Go ahead and laugh,' Ray had said with a shrug, releasing the clutch. They'd been on their way to his sister's for a barbeque, he remembered, and looking at her he'd suddenly felt the same deep dragging inertia he felt now. The sight of her there, holding a cling-wrapped pavlova in the passenger seat, mouth a sour twist, her pink blusher sparkling in a shaft of sunlight. Something creeping over him like a slow anaesthetic.

‘I've tried,' she'd said a few months later when she told him they were splitting up, ‘but it's all going downhill.'

‘I thought we were going good,' he had answered, hearing the whine in his voice, hating it, ‘and now you're telling me you're moving out.'

She'd rolled her eyes like he was the thickest kid in the class. ‘Not me, Ray,' she'd said. ‘You. You're the one moving out.'

SLOW
, the sign said. And then the flashing arrow for the detour, down past the boarded-up hotel and the old saleyards. Ray yawned. He'd be late, but everyone would be late today and, anyway, the manager was never out the back, at the warehouse where Ray worked three days a week, and lucky to have that. So what if he was late? How many nested imitation terracotta pots could the public want in one morning? He idled, watching the traffic, exhaust fumes shimmering in the dust raised by the labouring machines on the line, their battered metal teeth jerking and tugging at the railway tracks, trashing them.

SLOW. SLOW. STOP
. Then flip, his turn.

The road worker aimed his mirrored and shadowed gaze at Ray as he drove past and gave a wave that had been reduced to its bare minimum: a single, slow-motion finger lifted in acknowledgement that here was one man passing another man who was pretending to be doing a job of work, bored shitless and leaning on a one-word sign. Ray raised a finger off the wheel in response, glancing at the expressionless face and looking away again. Didn't know him.

Up ahead he heard a splintering crack, like ice, as an excavator levered up one of the railway sleepers, the big engine surging to get purchase on the gravel.

By late afternoon, when Ray was at the pub, there was already talk of the sleepers.

‘They're pushing them into piles,' Frank was saying. ‘Sorting them from shit to good. So they've got to be selling them on.'

‘See, if that contractor was a local,' said Vince, ‘anyone could go and help themselves to some of them for firewood. Anyone at all.'

‘Not these bastards. They'll be selling them on to some other subcontractor, any money. That's why they've got that barrier round them. They tender for these jobs and they screw the last cent out of 'em. That's the way they do business.' Frank, who hadn't worked for fourteen months.

Afterwards when Ray drove Vince home down past the intersection, he saw the old sleepers piled high — big dark timbers, rooted up now and useless. A string of flapping orange flags erected around them.

‘If that's the barrier,' Ray said, ‘it looks fairly token.'

‘Thing is,' said Vince, pointing, ‘people'll be after those for landscaping. You wait. And they'll go to the other spot they're working on, that old crossing out of town.'