Eyrie

by Tim Winton

  That was nice, said Gemma, head lolling against his chest. Better than a visit to the funny farm.

  He tried to smile. At himself, at her directness. Here he was with all his tics and anxieties. He should take this for what it was, a bit of comradely relief. That’s all she meant by it. That’s all it could be.

  What’s the matter? she asked.

  Nothing. I guess I just didn’t see it coming.

  You didn’t want to?

  It’s not that.

  Cause it didn’t feel that way to me.

  He pulled her to him, felt her hair spill across him.

  Good old Tom. You need to see everythin comin, don’t you? You’re that sort.

  And after it’s arrived I’m the kind of sad bugger who has to look a gift horse in the mouth.

  Which isn’t a real flatterin way to talk about a girl.

  Sorry.

  Her laugh was low and inflammatory. He wished they could just stop talking and go back to fucking. She felt it. She reached down between his legs.

  Aw, Tommy. Tom Keely.

  Stupid, he said.

  Who?

  Me, he said.

  I just suddenly wanted to.

  Suddenly?

  Well, gradually. And then suddenly. Like a bastard.

  Wow.

  Nothing wrong with that, is there?

  He shrugged.

  What?

  Nothing.

  Jesus, she said. You really, actually wanna know why, like a list of reasons?

  Oh, maybe not, he said.

  Right, then, she said briskly, as if drawing the discussion to a close.

  It was confounding, delightful, having Gemma Buck here, stroking him idly like this as the building rumbled and clanked. It was unimaginable.

  I don’t even like birds, she muttered.

  What?

  Birds.

  Oh. Okay.

  Like, I had a good day, don’t get me wrong.

  But you don’t fancy birds, he said, finding it hard to concentrate with her thigh slippery against his fingertips.

  Fuckin hate em.

  Pretty common phobia.

  It’s not that, she said impatiently.

  Well, he said, stuck, aching, distracted.

  Shit, you don’t know what it was like for me.

  What what was like? he said, hearing the weary tone of his voice.

  Blackboy Crescent.

  Well, I was there, wasn’t I?

  No, she said, letting him go. I don’t think so. Not the same way I was.

  What’re you talking about?

  Different for you.

  Because I moved away? Because I went to university? Geez, Gemma, he said, sitting up abruptly. What is it with you?

  You want me to go?

  No, Keely lied, pulling away, embarrassed now by his uncharacteristically durable hard-on. This whole scene was just too bloody peculiar; an awful mistake.

  I think I’ll go, she said, turning away.

  Kai’s alone, he said, as if it mattered more now than it had fifteen minutes ago.

  Yeah, she said. Thanks for the reminder.

  She reached for her clothes.

  Wait, he said. I’m sorry.

  No worries. No hard feelins, eh.

  What were you saying? What is it I don’t know?

  Doesn’t matter.

  Please.

  It doesn’t. Not anymore. Well, it shouldn’t.

  He stretched across to where she sat, fingered her hair in a way that seemed to irritate her. He watched the curve of her back, the heavy tilt of her breasts. She smelt of smoke and sweat and come and now she did not want to be touched.

  You shoulda used a condom, she said. Jesus, I need a shower.

  Shower here.

  I should go.

  Stay a minute.

  You just want to fuck me again.

  I thought we could talk, he said, which was half the truth at least.

  No, I’ll go.

  Just tell me, he said. This thing. About birds.

  She sighed. She was quiet for a long moment.

  They make me feel bad. Sad and guilty, sorta thing.

  But they’re just birds.

  See, when I was a kid, men wanted me.

  Yes. It’s … it’s —

  Shit, that’s what it is. And it wasn’t my fault. I thought it was just Baby. She was older. She didn’t mind so much. But I didn’t want it. Christ, I didn’t even know what it was, what it meant. They were always touchin me. Even the way they looked was like they were touchin me.

  Oh, mate.

  In the end you kinda give in. But before that I still had some fight, you know? But it meant I did somethin rotten, shockin.

  Who could blame you? I mean, hell.

  When I was eight I set fire to somethin. It wasn’t an accident – I planned it. Thought about it for days. Figured out how to do it. In cold blood, you know?

  Like a car or something?

  It was an aviary.

  Keely jerked upright, nearly tipping her off the bed.

  Bunker’s birdcage, he said. That was you?

  I hated him, that grimy old bastard.

  He had a bad leg. No, a club foot.

  Caught me in his yard once. Lookin at the budgies and the finches and the cockies. Said he wouldn’t tell no one. He got me by the hair, the plaits, pushed me up against the wire and all the birds are goin crazy, all claws and beaks and flappin. And he says things to me a little girl shouldn’t have to hear. All the time, those birds rushin at me, my face hard in the wire, and he’s got his hand right up me, like a bloke pullin the gizzards out of a Christmas turkey.

  Keely’s gorge rose. He sat beside her, close but not touching.

  I shoulda told your mum, she said, her voice flat, almost deadened. Nev woulda fuckin killed him. And I wanted him to. But I was embarrassed, afraid – ashamed, I guess. And I wanted to fight, you know? Fix it meself.

  But. Eight years old.

  I got petrol from the can near the mower. Nev’s mower. Tipped it into a shampoo bottle. Waited till Bunker was out – the races or somethin, down at the pub, I dunno. Went around the back, squirted everythin. Whole cage. Them poor birds goin spare. Just lit the match. And whoof! Lucky I didn’t set meself alight. They were like crackers goin off, all those poor birds. Just flames flyin and screamin. Like Catherine wheels, they were. It was fuckin horrible. I wish I’d done his house instead. Wish I never done it.

  That was really you?

  I used to wonder if they suspected and didn’t let on. Nev and Doris, I mean. Protectin me. Sometimes I wish they hadn’t. Because afterwards I had no fight left. I just put up with it. Not from Bunker. He didn’t dare. But there were other blokes.

  Gemma, I had no idea.

  Well, I never told, did I?

  We should have known. They should have stopped it.

  Back then, nobody was lookin the way they look now. Ya mum’n dad, they didn’t see it. And I couldn’t tell em.

  Keely thought of the plume of smoke, the fire engine arriving, the almost festive air in the street, and Faith’s pronouncement at dinner that whoever incinerated those poor birds didn’t deserve to live. Were the Buck girls there at the table?

  He died, y’know. Years later. Old Bunker. And I reckon he always knew. I went to his funeral for a laugh. I was as pissed as a rat, but it felt great.

  She reached for her dress on the floor, fished around for her ruined knickers but cast them aside and stepped into the dress.

  Look at you, she said. Buyer’s remorse.

  No.

  Doesn’t matter. I got what I came for.

  Chicken and sage in white wine.

  Yeah, she said with a hoarse laugh. Here, zip me up.

  You’re only a couple of doors down; it’s dark out there.

  Girl’s still got standards.

  This evening notwithstanding.

  As she presented her back he felt a pang of lust but resisted the urge to pull he
r to him. He saw that old man with her hair in his fist, pressing up behind her. Keely touched only the zip and stepped back as she turned to survey him in the crooked light.

  It’s alright, he said. I’m still safe.

  Safe enough. Anyway, it was a oncer. There’s the boy to think of.

  Sure.

  But it was fun, eh. I always wondered.

  Well, I guess now you know.

  She smiled and he followed her through to the door, and heard the bars of the walkway still jangling after she was gone.

  It was there again. The stain. Or a dirty great blotch just like it. Right in front of the slider. Only a step or so from the balcony, on perfectly dry carpet. A ghostly macula at a distance, but close up there was no missing it. The size of a sleeping dog, curled in front of the smudged glass. Smelt of nothing but nasty nylon carpet, though underfoot it was crisp, almost crusty. Shit a brick, he didn’t need this at the beginning of a new week, staggering bright-eyed and bushy-tailed into the frigging Shroud of Turin. And having woken this early and so clearheaded he wasn’t about to squat here all day scratching his head and reading entrails. Rare as rocking-horse turds, these days, feeling halfway to decent, with barely a sick twinge, and he was damned if he’d waste it.

  Even though the sheets smelt sweeter this morning, he stripped the bed and bagged them with a couple of other loads he left churning in the laundromat on the ground floor. Walking past the soup kitchens and dosshouses, he considered starting the day at Bub’s where he was safest, where there was less to provoke a flare-up, but he felt sturdy enough to sit out on the Strip and watch the weekday circus stir itself into inaction. He didn’t know if this was confidence or masochism, but he strode along the avenue of coloured brollies and set himself down on the prime corner where the view was good and the coffee decent. He marked his territory with his sunglasses and a Rupert-rag he filched from an abandoned table. He went indoors, as was the local custom, and queued up to order. You had to love it, the way a cafeteria could still pass itself off as an actual café. Well, so be it, he thought. When not in Rome. Et cetera.

  Due to the early hour there were only five or six in line ahead of him at the counter and it wasn’t such a long wait by Freo standards. Even at the top of his game, when his social capital was enviable and the glaze of his armour seamless, this procedural ordeal was like being paraded in front of the class, like a perp walk, with the haughty baristas before him and the watchful lurkers at every table behind. Keely focused best he could on the comestibles in their brightly lit cabinets, the delicious oily reek of milled beans. He crabbed his way to the cash register, stood in the receiving line like all the other supplicants, and emerged unmolested with a pretty decent double espresso and a blueberry muffin like a bloated toadstool. His ten-dollar sunglasses were still on the table but the shopsoiled newspaper had been botted by someone else. No matter, it’d served its purpose, which was worth a nod in the great man’s direction. Wherever that was. Now that he was ubiquitous, multinational, omniscient, perhaps even eternal.

  The sun was out, the shadows black and deep beneath the awnings. The first suited skateboarders were hurtling by with backpacks and briefcases. Women in pencil skirts and four-inch heels minced their way towards the train station. Keely settled in, nursing his mood as much as the coffee, in order to watch and marvel.

  He felt a rare and comradely magnanimity as locals arrived to stretch their yogic limbs and kick off their Berserkenstocks.

  Here and there, once his eyes adjusted, he recognized the odd face: a chanteuse fiddling with her manky dreads, a couple of Labor Party grifters, the retired QC and his jaunty little mutt. Across the street at safe distance, a Greens claque conferred behind a stockade of bicycles and to his relief followed their daffy MP into the juice joint in the alley beyond. All around him dogged Aquarians discussed positive energy, bodywork, and the Real Causes of Cancer, and it was nothing to him, water off a duck’s proverbial. Close by, right at his elbow, a spidery Amazon with a shock of henna began to shout into her phone about social evolution and personal transformation. She’d moved on from revolution, she said, but she still believed passionately in radical change. She was rather fetching in her saffron tank top. Perhaps she mistook his indulgent grin for something untoward, for she snatched up her towering soy latte and stalked off to another table, sallying on without a comma.

  By nine almost anyone who did anything productive in this burg had cast off their lines and steamed out to sea or hustled to the station for the express to Dullsville. Which left quite a crew of idlers like himself who seemed to have nowhere to be and nothing to produce. He wondered how many trust funds kept the bustling Strip in business, how much could be attributed to middle-class welfare. The moment he thought it he began to feel his serenity give way to pangs of unfocused guilt and anxiety. The entire scene was a festival of procrastination. And it was amazing how snugly he fitted.

  He couldn’t help but think of all the charity kitchens only a few blocks away, the underclass gathered alfresco for a sandwich and an industrial brew. Invalid pensioners, denizens of the dosshouses, park sleepers, wharf rats, outpatients of the failing mental health service. At this rate he’d be joining their number soon enough. He guessed rough-sleepers and drunks had their own resolutions and rituals of deferral. Street shouters were armed with excuses; he’d heard their litanies of grievance and misunderstanding. He’d slot in handsomely. If only he wasn’t so soft. The moment would surely come. And then he’d hit the final barrier, the stubborn middle-class conviction that his was a special case. When really he was just a creepy fuckwit poncing through town full of peace and love because he’d got his rocks off. A tipsy grandma desperate for a root had hauled him into bed and given him a blowsy seeing-to. His triumphal glow was pathetic. And that was nothing when you thought of the aftermath. Her confession. To which he’d listened distractedly, still pawing her, like a grimy priest who couldn’t distinguish her needs from his own. He disgusted himself. In an instant he felt oblivion stalking, crackling, flashing behind his eyes, and he welcomed it, deserved it.

  His glass shattered on the pavement. The saucer wheeled in woozy arcs at the feet of startled loungers. One arm flapped independent of him and as he stood and fled he clawed it into submission with the other, breaking into a shambling run through a wilderness of spots and sparks.

  Furious blank.

  A kind of.

  Kind of.

  Kind of turbulence.

  Suddenly down by the marina. Standing, walking. Sleepwalking, really. With gulls like empty thought bubbles overhead. How many minutes had he lost? Ten? Twenty? Closer to forty. Jesus!

  Okay.

  Tamp down the panic.

  Okay.

  Nothing you can do about it. Well, nothing you’ll let yourself do. Being what and who you are.

  Alright. Whatever.

  So.

  Here he was.

  The marina. The fishing-boat harbour. Prawn trawlers, crayboats. Yachts. Boardwalks. Finger jetties.

  He must have had something in mind. During his little lapse in transmission, while the test pattern flashed on and on inside. Some destination, a plan, a notional refuge that eluded him for the moment. But here he was. The marina. Where, yes, he had spent a lot of time in better days. Their little sloop that Harriet referred to as The Folly. Okay, he thought. This is where you’ve brought yourself. Old circuits firing. So walk. Walk it out, walk it off.

  And as he did he let his safer thoughts unsnarl themselves slowly. Could only think of them as coloured wires now. All brittle, everything ginger. Couldn’t get straight, shiny lines anymore, no orderly layout like something fresh from the shop floor. But he could separate them, more or less, even if they were still nested around that awful pulsing void, the dread he’d been hauling about the past few months. It had no size or shape. Its origins obscure. It was his own dark planet. Within him. And there was absolutely no point in giving it direct attention; it was simply there, he accepted it now, th
rumming like something about to detonate. But with sufficient will, bending every perilous thought aside, keeping all wires from touching, you could shrink it from something planetary to just a blemish, a fleck, like a tiny bit of shadow-matter tracking momentarily across the sun. Safer, better, not to look. Took such a shitload of energy, though, powering it down by mental force. Just to make some space and turn your thoughts to lesser mysteries. Like how to make a living, first and foremost. Because it really was conceivable that before Easter he could be working on his grimy street tan like those poor buggers lining up outside St Pat’s. If he didn’t pull up, if he didn’t shake this self-pitying jag he was giving into day upon day, it wasn’t just possible but inevitable. He couldn’t let Doris keep propping him up. She’d paid his phone bill. He owed it to her to get his shit together.

  He shuffled away from the boardwalk and the tourist traps, tailed by a posse of gulls. Busy little pricks, gulls.

  He thought about going back to teaching. Still possible, wasn’t it? If he could tidy himself up, get his nerves in order. It would weird people out, having him there again, considering what he’d been doing. He was too long out of the game. Things had changed. And now public education was like bearbaiting. He’d faced down proxy thugs of all species, from robber barons to the unions. But he shivered at the prospect of being left alone in a room with thirty fifteen-year-olds. Maybe something non-contact, a support role? Which had its own complications. Given that he’d probably burnt a few bridges in the bureaucracy over the years. There were heads of department who’d make certain his applications were regrettably unsuccessful.

  Which left what – gardening, driving a taxi? For all his skills and achievements these were his best chances and he should bloody well get used to it because to the pollies he was poison, too dangerous, too likely to say something uncomfortable. A decade and a half of supreme self-control and in a few minutes he’d rendered himself a rogue forever. In the media he was a heretic, a traitor to progress.