New Australian Stories 2 (26 page)

At length a sequence of images came to mind, none fully formed. I remembered being down in the garage and struggling to unlock the lattice door that leads into the space below the house, then crawling past stacks of firewood and rusted bicycle parts, over to the boxes of wine that my girlfriend's father had stored there years ago.

My girlfriend, Jess, she'd been in Bangkok for several weeks. She was studying aquaculture, conducting experiments with barramundi.

Back in the bathroom, as the water pooled at one end of the old bathtub, two or three chips of paint came away from the metal and drifted to the edge like snowflakes.

That my short-term memory was poor was no revelation. It had been steadily worsening.

Also beside the sink was the portable phone and a book of poetry by Aleksandr Pushkin, the Russian poet. For four years I'd been writing a thesis on Russian literature. I was still a long way from finishing. I gazed momentarily at the frosted-glass window and could just discern the outline of the garden outside — some plants animated by the wind, some melted colours.

I undressed. Then, as I eased into the water, the phone rang. It was Jess.

The line was pretty bad. Her voice had an ethereal quality. ‘They're dead,' she said.

‘Who?' I slid down in the tub so that everything but my face and hands was submerged. I always pictured her there in long rubber boots, a numb choir of industrial filters going in the background.

‘My fish.' She sighed loudly.

I frowned and held the phone away from my ear. She was probably pressing her palm against her forehead.

‘… just such a waste of time,' she said.

The line was cutting out intermittently. I reached for my book, trying to open it and hold it at a reasonable angle with my free hand. She was waiting for me to say something.

‘So, you didn't get any results or whatever?'

She sniffed. I decided against asking her to hold the phone away from her face when making those kinds of noises. ‘We didn't even get that far,' she said. ‘It's only a few days since we've even been able to see them.'

I waited before saying: ‘What?'

‘It isn't important now. They're basically invisible until the fourth week. The larvae. They're less than one millimetre long and they're translucent. We don't really even know if they've spawned or not. But we still have to feed them.'

‘Without knowing whether or not they exist?' I considered this for a few seconds. ‘That's kind of nice.'

‘No. Anyway they did
exist
.' She emphasised the word as if, lacking substance, it didn't fit. ‘But then they died anyway.'

‘Still,' I said, my mouth tightening to prefigure a little smile. ‘It's a nice idea.'

There was a period of silence in which, I thought, we seemed almost to be analysing each other's willingness to let that silence continue. We didn't always see things the same way, Jess and I, which could result in some disjointed conversations. She'd just ignore some of the things I said, or else wait quietly until I returned to good sense.

‘Sorry,' I started to say, or had decided to say, but she spoke at the same time.

‘Anyway,' she said, taking a deep breath, composing herself, ‘so I'm coming home tomorrow. I'll email flight details.'

‘Right. Well, that'll be good.'

Then she asked if I was okay. I sounded weird, she said. There was a hint of maternal reserve in her tone.

I looked up at the patterned, pressed-tin ceiling and recited from memory: ‘
Such, as I was before, I'm now left to be:
reckless, susceptible.
' She didn't respond. ‘Aleksandr Pushkin,' I explained. ‘Eighteen twenty-six.' Then I noticed the wooden carving beside the sink. ‘Hey, did you send this fucking wooden thing?'

‘… think it was?' was all I heard. I squinted as if to put right the squalling connection. ‘… like it?'

‘It's fucking grotesque,' I said.

She laughed, I think, then said, ‘It's the likeness of some animal they found up in the mountains or something. A few months ago. A bad omen, they reckon. Part human, part something else, totally hairless. Supposedly they've got it in a cage somewhere.'

I sat up a little. The bathroom light, coalescing with the steam, seemed to take on some physical properties. So, I found myself thinking, they finally found the island. I shook that thought from my head, then asked: ‘Why did you send me a bad omen?'

‘It isn't
actually
a bad omen,' Jess said. ‘… tourists. It's fun.'

The interference grew louder, now containing a thin continuous whine, finally culminating in silence.

Later I walked around the house mindlessly collecting bottle caps and pieces of scrap paper, pausing to scrutinise some trivial thing: the pair of dusty old pedestal fans by the front door, for instance. Even the slightest details seemed to suggest some fearsome consequence of my existence. I'd acquired a thoroughgoing fear of terminal illness. I opened all of the doors and windows, wanting fresh air.

The days had all been the same. I seldom left the house. I'd gotten into the habit of reading and writing until the early hours of the morning, or later, then cooking some noodles and falling asleep, drunk, in front of an old film. Jess had only called a few times. Once to tell me she'd made some friends, another time shouting and slurring and urging me to listen while she sang karaoke. I heard male voices in the background.

I resented her for leaving me alone for so long.

I sat down to reread my work from the night before. I lit a cigarette. I made some notes in the margins but couldn't concentrate, eventually deciding to walk to the pub for a meal.

The air was cool. I took a long coat from the wooden hatstand by the door and set out, imagining myself as some Russian. Our street was lined on both sides by tall peppermint trees which almost joined above the middle of the road to form a remarkable canopy, and all of it was glowing deep pink with the beginnings of sunset. The sky seemed like a great, stitched wound.

The bar was quiet. I ordered a bottle of house wine and a basket of bread. I stayed there reading for several hours.

As I was finishing the last glass of wine a woman approached my table, offering to buy a round of drinks. I accepted without thinking. Trying to picture her now I can only conjure an impression of sorts, something near formless and shifting in the half-light; first convulsing with garish laughter, next pressing up against me, smelling stale.

We talked for a while, and she kept buying the drinks. When the bar closed I invited her back to the house and poured us both some whisky.

‘What do you do?' she asked. At the end of each sentence she addressed me as
darl
. Her eyes, I noticed, were small and dark and alert.

‘I'm a writer,' I said, affecting total self-confidence, handing her a glass. ‘A writer and a doctorate student.'

Her reply was basically unintelligible.

‘You have an accent,' I said. ‘Where are you from?'

‘American by birth.' She turned the glass in her hand, looking into it for her responses. ‘Manhattan,' she added. ‘Ever been?' I said that I had. ‘Weird island,' she said, which I thought was a dull assessment. Still, I nodded.

‘Surreal,' I said. We stood quietly in agreement.

In fact, Jess and I had visited Manhattan only a few months before. We rented a place in SoHo. We walked the streets, interpreting. Banks of blackened snow, frozen solid, lined the sidewalks like geological formations. Christmas trees, out with the trash and wrapped in black plastic, were mob victims. The yellow cabs, I said, were herd animals at a standstill and honking as if to gauge one another's position, or just to declare their being. One day, outside the Museum of Natural History, there was a spooked horse running uptown through the traffic. It came into sight — at first a monstrous, changeable thing — two blocks away, seemingly fashioned from the commotion surrounding it. It got to within a few metres of us. What might have been fear shone from its eyes as purpose, and Jess, I remember, was remarking upon its beauty just as one of its legs buckled and the poor creature skidded a short distance, all limbs, attempting recovery, then collapsed in front of us, making a terrible sound unique even to that city. At length a police officer covered the animal's trembling head and shot it. He straightened up, the officer, apparently having mistaken necessity for heroism, and searched our faces for appreciation. Impossibly hungover, I vomited in the snow. That evening was the first time Jess mentioned my drinking.

The American woman — I never got her name — kept making advances, and finally I let her stay, more out of interest than anything else. Her skin was mottled, brown and hairless. Unwrinkled but spongy. When we kissed, her lips were dry and, I realised, slightly asymmetrical. A faint scar ran between her upper lip and her nose. She had long bleached-blonde hair and fake, stone-firm breasts.

More than once her manner struck me as inconsistent. Her generally dizzy, flirtatious bearing was prone to frank interjections. At one point she was straddling me, keeping her eyes closed and making small, breathy sounds. Then, as if startled, she halted, looked at me and — newly lucid, her voice an octave lower — said: ‘No anal.'

I repeated those words in my head until they lost their import, then their intonation, and soon I was certain she'd said, and was maybe still saying, as the room spun: ‘I'm real.'

Afterwards we lay on top of the bedspread in silence. She was on her side with her left arm in an angular figuration, her open hand supporting her head. I was tracing her curves with my index finger, more brooding than affectionate, watching ripples of skin swell, roll and level out.

The windows were still open. The room was incredibly cold.

The best thing to do, I thought, would be to call James. I drank the last of the whisky and went into the bathroom to find the phone.

James is married. He lives on the other side of the country with his wife and two children. I realised when he answered that it was well after midnight.

‘I just worked out how late it is, man,' I said. ‘I'm sorry. I can call back.'

‘Drew?'

‘Yeah. Yeah, sorry man. I didn't want to wake you. I didn't want …'

‘What do you want?' He was clearing his throat a lot.

‘If you have a second. Just, like, one minute.' My mouth felt inordinately small. My tongue was mostly unresponsive to commands. James was waiting for me to speak. ‘I thought you'd want to know,' I managed to say, ‘that your animals have come to life. Or they've been discovered. Or whatever.'

‘Drew,' he said, more loudly, in rebuke, ‘what the fuck?' I thought I heard his wife say something in the background.

‘The mural,' I said, feeling at my jaw as if to recalibrate it. ‘That you painted on my ceiling. The animals are fucking alive man. At least one of them is here. Two maybe.' He didn't answer. I lost balance, then steadied myself against the wall. My hands were trembling. ‘Is it cold where you are?' I asked. I could hear him breathing. I was seized by this fear that I'd disappointed him. ‘All right, forget that. I'm sorry, man. But one … another thing.' I suppressed a hiccup, unsubtly. ‘Is it possible that you don't like Jess? Like, you can just say it. You know what you think means a lot. More than you know.' I paused, then added: ‘I can get rid of her.'

There was no response. James had hung up. I dropped the phone and sat down on the cold tiles, listening to the steady hum of the retractor fan, shivering uncontrollably.

At one point I heard the front door close. A while later I got up to make some coffee. I spent the rest of the night trying to tidy, reciting poetry to the empty house.

Sometime around dawn I drove Jess's car to the airport. I had no idea what time her flight was getting in, so I just found a seat in the arrivals lounge and tried to read. The west-facing wall was composed entirely of windows. I watched the planes as they negotiated the sky with what seemed an impossible weightlessness, and I waited, unable to shake the idea that the sunrise was some kind of celestial wreckage.

Birdsong

MYFANWY JONES

When he should be turning sausages with the others, patting backs, he is instead in the rented shed at the back of the rented garden in Lalor with a six-pack. He won't be going anywhere today.

One of the slat windows is rusted open, but he shuts out urban birdsong with country music. He still can't listen to the birds, cannot tolerate their high-pitched hopeful calls. They don't sing of wildfire; of death and devastation, homelessness and starvation. It's not in their repertoire. He can't listen but at the same time he misses them, with an ache that feels strangely like unrequited love, as if his joy in them will forever now be out of reach. He turns up the volume on Adam Brand and cracks open the first can.

This reminds him of playing truant as a boy in short pants: the thrill of taking off up the bluestone alley near the school at the final lunch bell. I'm outta here! Just try and stop me! It was an eleven-year-old
fuck you
to the world. All too soon, the buzz would wear off and the fear would set in, and he'd spend the stolen afternoon loitering in the back streets with a bag of mixed lollies, scared and bored and lonely. But it didn't stop him from doing it again, anything for that first rush, and probably, too, he half hoped he'd be caught, get the strap and some of his mother's attention.
Would you just stop
me already?