The Airways

by Jennifer Mills

  ‘I’ve told you this story, haven’t I?’ She watched his expression with her irrefutable lawyer’s eyes so he made it carefully neutral. ‘Some guy broke into my room at night. He just about climbed into bed with me, actually.’ She turned back to Kate, who gave a nod of encouragement.

  Adam was not sure he knew the story. If it was familiar, he had forgotten many of the details. A stranger, he remembered now. An honest mistake. As she spoke, the blood rose to his cheeks. He turned away, eyes searching for coffee. The silver pot was on the stove. Still warm when he put his hand against it.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ he told it, lifting the lid. ‘Mind if I finish this?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Kate.

  He tried to imagine what it would be like. He began to position himself in the scene. First as Marita, the outrage of a sleeper woken: shouting, gripping sheets to her chest. Then as the intruder, leaning in. But already he had moved into a third position, that of an observer standing at the threshold. The imaginary flat had white French windows, the lawn was trimmed and wet. The image had a familiar, worn feeling. Adam had the unsettling sense that he had dreamed it. He drank the coffee quickly. There had been, he remembered now, a police report, a whole drama. No suspect apprehended. It had been years ago, before this house; it had nothing to do with him. Just a man, the dark. These things had always happened. The observer remained neutral.

  ‘I remember now. You hit him,’ said Adam.

  ‘Punched him in the face, and he bolted,’ Marita said, tugging a black curl. Kate grinned.

  ‘They never caught him?’ Adam already knew the answer.

  ‘Nope. Cops tried to tell me it was a one-off.’

  ‘Some random drunk guy,’ said Adam.

  The women rolled their eyes.

  ‘I didn’t sleep for weeks,’ Marita said. She had moved out of the flat, he remembered that now, and got this house. Her own name on the lease, bars on the windows, careful about who she let in. Well, not that careful. She had always seemed a little high-strung, though.

  ‘When something like this happens, you play it back to yourself,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Kate. ‘All the what-ifs.’

  ‘Something like what?’ The last sip of coffee was grainy; Adam ran his tongue over his teeth.

  ‘You haven’t heard? A girl was murdered.’ Marita spoke darkly.

  ‘Last night, right near uni,’ said Kate.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Adam. ‘Who?’ His body was not taking caffeine well.

  ‘A girl from one of the colleges,’ said Marita. ‘Nineteen. There’ll be a vigil on Thursday.’

  He exhaled. ‘Do they know who did it?’

  The women almost laughed at him. It bruised like accusation. A random attack; these things happened. Why should he have to establish his innocence? But their expressions had shifted back to seriousness before he could object to them.

  ‘Does your sister still live in that house?’ Kate asked.

  Marita nodded, curls falling over her face. ‘She’s installed a bunch of security since then. Sensors, everything. Anyway, it’s turning into a much nicer area. They rent the flat out to a gay couple now, so.’ She made the sign for money, thumb against her fingertips.

  The conversation defaulted to the problems of real estate. Adam tried to relax. He concentrated on his cereal. Too soft in his mouth already.

  He’d done nothing wrong.

  When he thought of it, he saw the night from outside. Watched himself hesitating by their bedroom door. It had been that other Adam who had pushed it and slipped inside. The sleepwalking Adam. The memory separated from his daylight world like a layer of pastry. He had crossed into another place; everything was lit strange there.

  It was not the same, of course. A look had passed between them, an understanding. It was hard to name. There was a connection, that was all. Yun would be asleep in the front room right now, their arm over their head, their eyes lashed closed. He had crossed over to join them. It was nothing like violence.

  He did not think of it for long.

  ‘I better go, I’m supposed to be meeting my supervisor,’ said Marita. ‘Speaking of creeps.’ She and Kate sort of laughed. It was often hard to tell if their jokes were jokes. He looked out the window to avoid reacting in the wrong way.

  It had rained the night before and the eucalypts were glistening; the city had a clean smell of moist forest that would soon decay. When the women left the kitchen, he stood looking out through the distorted glass at the wet trees. A few clouds floated, puffy and white like Marita’s bedding. Her soft life, her rows of potions, but a hardness beneath. Kate’s netball clothes. The balled sports socks. The texture of their possessions. It wasn’t anything serious. It did no harm.

  His mother had started it. She had bundled up his father’s clothes and taken them to the op shop much too soon. As a child he had looked for traces of him in drawers, pockets, high shelves: anywhere he could gain entrance. There were photographs, some books, but he wanted the texture of life. The matter of it. He had a tiny pocketknife, a leather keyring, one check handkerchief that he had stolen from the garbage bags in the hall, folded into a square and ironed flat. These things had lost their scent entirely.

  In her grief she was distant, unforgiving. Angry, he supposed. He had wanted something else. Over many months, he had learned to be consoled by the search itself. No-one there to show him how to be, in a house of women. He could not fill the space that was missing. It was in him too, an emptiness that he carried in his body, from the chest, the throat, the fingertips. Adam, he heard her voice from the door. What are you doing?

  I’m not doing anything. I’m only looking.

  She slapped his hand. Sent him to specialists. They told him what he needed (a father figure, one suggested), they gave him strategies. He promised he would stop.

  After that he waited until she was out. He was careful, had learned to be careful, but would not have remembered to return everything to its place. And she was sharp, not much got past her. It was possible she knew, and just permitted it. Understood, or consented, or hoped he would outgrow it. Which he had, really. No thanks to her.

  He thought of her telling her friends about it. A son who went rummaging in underwear. He imagined them saying: Let it play itself out. He imagined their laughter.

  He heard a door open, then close, from the front of the house, and swallowed. His throat was milky from the cereal. He should go to uni, catch up on his reading in the library. And maybe he would take a break for a few weeks, a fortnight, until the end-of-year exams. Because of the vigil, his housemates would be watchful. The women especially.

  It was harmless, it was only looking. But he would stop. A week would do. Until after the party, Saturday. Six days away. That would be generous.

  They might not have a party now. It would be a relief if they decided to cancel. Though he would have to text the people he had told about it and tell them not to come. He would wait a day or two before he acted; he would let the women decide what to do.

  He heard their footsteps, soft in the hallway.

  A few days would do it. Just enough to get clear.

  RIVER

  They are awake, now. In forms of awake and now that are new. Nothing’s the same. Only remainder. Can this become some kind of life?

  To be in a heel as it strikes upholstery, feel it prick them through the sock, to inhabit the muscles under the toes as they scrunch and flex, to feel the effort to reject containment, by the sock, by the body, to learn new ways of being.

  They would not go back now, even if they could.

  The child’s body strapped into restraints and kicking. Car seat angles embrace the legs’ refusal, spite in the crunched face. The woman turns to look back at the child through bloodshot eyes. Her desperate smile. They feel the kid’s attachment to his rhythm, and its satisfaction, fade aga
inst a brighter longing for the mother’s body, more home than his own. She speaks sweetly to him, turns away, starts the engine. They don’t understand a word. Feel the voice as it settles against the skin. This isn’t living.

  The child whines them out.

  In the firm mouth of a shopkeeper, the muscles that frown, in the accumulated work between the shoulder blades, the strain across the chest. He bends at the knees, sensibly. They experience him, and are bent there, with pleasure.

  A bell rings and the shopkeeper spits into his half-drunk tea. There is something wrong in his mouth. Something dark and sour enters the saliva from a tooth. They are drawn into that abscess, its centring pain. They open in his toothache like a flower, feel its twinge and his hard shudder. The nerve runs right into the brain. His whole body responds.

  Someone is speaking to him. They get noise and pleasantness and facial muscles shifting. Perhaps he isn’t listening. The particularity of the body is utterly absorbing.

  He replies. They feel the jaw grate against the abscess, the nod stretch the back of the neck, the effort of grinning. A lift of the eyes. The warm hum in the throat, the comfort of the voice. Heat and breath, the emptied chest, but still no meaning.

  The person takes a newspaper, hands him coins warm from their pocket. The shopkeeper drops them in a drawer, sorted by a practised thumb, then wipes the heat of the coins, of the other man’s body, from his skin against one trouser leg. Dog-scratch of fabric. Calls out after him. Sound, no meaning. The headlines are nothing but marks.

  The other man waves without turning, and the door rings closed.

  In the street, in an arm stretched by dragging. Pieces that lodge like splinters, like guests. No, they don’t want to go back; they want to persist. If a hooked seed longs to lodge on the fur. If a berry longs to be eaten by a bird. If a spore longs to land in the soil, then life wants living. Wants growing.

  They want to live.

  The rope in the palm cuts into the skin and the fingers tighten, yank. They are out of the arm and into the warm in a warm dog, and long for this too; the dog-body’s hot coherence, its muscle-meat enough to hold them. But the animal information floods them, drowned in a shock of nasal data, the map of salivation’s unknown lands, burnt images. The dog’s whole body is tensed at its imprisonment. Its bodymindedness compels it forward. A shake of it shakes them. Dislodges them at the neck. They float away from its spun skin like loose hairs, drops of water, air, and are gone.

  Later, elsewhere, they find themselves in a young body. It is night. The young body is lying in soft wet grass and it is clutching the roots through the dense wet, the cut scent of it. Awake to the details of sensation, more awake than most. One hand clutches. The other aloft, holding something smoking.

  They know the taste and this stirring. Lovely, the accelerated continuity. The overflow of sense beneath the skin. The mind does what it does in secret but they can feel the high in the hands, the way the mouth sits. The warm easing in the chest. Then in the burn of the inhale, the press in the lungs, the swirl of gases given time to enter blood. They can see the blur of domestic lights at the periphery of this garden, this park or yard. These eyes are up in the stars, and spinning in their witness. They can feel the brain’s alertness, the chemistry of something they’d call joy, but not with certainty. It could just be an idiotic safety.

  Minds are illegible; they read the body. Wet cold prickles under the back, the shirt too thin. Bacteria hitches a ride in the air, clings to a hair in the nostril. They move, are moved, into these discomforts, go where there are openings. (Do they open things?) The body coughs, its whole length poised and racking. The eyes leave the stars and return; the body sits up, relaxes. The joint held aloft. They are in the fingers where the burn will meet the skin. In sweet smoke.

  The body lies back in the grass, eyes to the stars. They remember these stars. They used to be a silver river.

  For a moment, all is floating to the surface. The attention hovers in the breath. This body awake, immersed in its being. The heart beats at the throat like it’s a door.

  BEIJING

  Adam meant to obey him, even began looking for a taxi, but the few in sight were occupied. He started to walk in the general direction of his apartment, not bothering to select a route. There was a major road just ahead, a cluster of pedestrians and bicycles waiting at the intersection. The air hung white above the traffic.

  He was not unwell, or not in the ordinary way. Something wasn’t right. He had been breathing the germy air in the office. The faulty air conditioning had been running, distributing its molecular junk into the lungs. Now he seemed to be fighting an infection. He touched the back of his hand to his forehead, but the gesture felt melodramatic and he withdrew it again quickly. In that brief assessment, his skin seemed the usual temperature. The headache was still there, moving just beneath the surface, its source hard to place. The body was maddeningly cryptic.

  He stopped at the intersection just as a bus sailed past, felt it disturb the air dangerously close to his chest. Driver mustn’t have seen him. The rest of the pedestrians were already halfway across, gathered under the overpass. Adam waited for the lights to change before joining them. He pressed the jacket against his chest, warm enough now without it. The shouty, automated voice of a reversing sānlúnchē startled him. When he looked up, a car was inching towards his feet. He picked up the pace, vaguely shamed by the encroachment, the bluntness of his instincts. When he reached the opposite corner, he stopped to catch his breath.

  He looked up at an empty shop, a handwritten sign scrawled in big red marker in the window. Closing down? Help wanted? He couldn’t read the characters. The glass was so dusty, it looked like it had been abandoned for years. He thought it had been a shoe store last week, but maybe that was a different corner. The dust might have been from construction. He was not sure where he was. After a moment his reflection resolved in the glass and he saw himself, his face flushed, the eyes small and sunken. He did not look unwell. The jacket was a burden against his chest.

  Adam resisted the impulse to touch the glass. Nor would he get out his phone and check the map. He would keep walking in what he felt to be the right direction, trust his instincts, his internal compass. Of course he knew which way he was headed; he had walked home before. He peered down the road until he recognised the convenience store where he had once stopped for a cold drink. And there was the woman who sold plants from the roadside beyond it, squatting beside her charges, staring out at the legs of passers-by. He looked over the road to see if the snack stall where he had once bought a steamed bun was open. The window had been piled with bamboo steamers, pancakes, eggs, frankfurts, spicy shredded potato, but now the shutters were down. The morning rush was over, or it had gone out of business.

  His legs complained as he crossed the road. First the calves pinged, and for a minute there was an unidentifiable pain in his thigh. The ache was moving through his body like some kind of clot. It was definitely aiming for his head. The pain gathered at the back of his skull. What if this was an incipient migraine, or worse, some bleeding on the brain that had gone undiagnosed for years, an aneurysm? With a surge of self-compassion, he imagined himself collapsed in the street. He was invisible. His body would not be identified. The trauma to the back of the head would erase him. The mind shuttered through a set of images; he did not understand where they came from. He folded them away. He had his wallet in his pocket, an Australian driver’s licence, a name. He was being ridiculous.

  He began to focus on the breath, to count his steps. One hundred to the next intersection, he estimated, maybe more. It was an adolescent strategy, he didn’t need it now, but it was there for him regardless. He would be twenty-eight in a few weeks. His breaths came short.

  Probably he was just unfit, unused to walking; he had not been to the gym since he had moved to the new neighbourhood. The gyms he had found were outrageously expensive. He didn’t mind
the team-building ball games with the guys from work but he wasn’t one of those people who loved the physicality of exercise. It was social, that was all. (One hundred and thirty seven.) And the gym was a chore, not a pleasure; when he did go he needed music to get through it. Manu had told him to persist, that he would get a buzz off it eventually. The closest he had come was afterwards, standing outside and looking back in through the glass at the other people on their machines, so focused they were oblivious to his presence metres from their faces, watching. He loved the concentration in their bodies, the inward attention.

  He had liked that about Natasha too, her self-containment, until she had turned that against him.

  Adam spotted a taxi, raised a hand. The passenger seats were empty, but it sailed past him. He was tired now, too tired to walk. He was definitely coming down with something; all he wanted was to sleep. If he turned here, followed the elevated ring road, he thought he could cut underneath it and get back onto the subway. Suddenly he was struck by a longing to be down there, in among the crowds, alone as he could not be in the street. With the bodies packed close together.

  That didn’t make sense. He wasn’t thinking straight. He should stay on the surface.

  He avoided the stairs of a pedestrian overpass, cut across to the next intersection and picked his way through a crowd gathered outside a market. Someone was selling rambutans from a cart, calling the price. Women pushed past him with both arms loaded, hefting bags or yanking children. Bicycles and electric scooters lined up side by side, ready to domino. There was a restlessness; he felt it pass through or around him. A mild panic in the tone of voices. Maybe the fruit was running out, or some bigger catastrophe was coming – a weather event, a police crackdown. He had no way of knowing. He stared at a mountain of leeks piled on a tarpaulin. A calm young man behind them, smoking, gave him a nod. Adam pretended not to see him.

  He let the sense of panic wash over him. There was nothing he could do about it. It was part of the machinery that rumbled through the city, another layer of noise beneath the traffic, angle grinders, traffic, breaking glass, traffic. Noise had official colours, white and pink and so on, Adam could not remember what the codes meant. If it had a colour, Beijing’s noise would be orange-grey, like its air. Or the blue-grey of the city’s bricks. Manu would appreciate these thoughts. Adam stepped away from the crowd and stood on the thin strip of green at the verge. An inexplicable sadness rippled through him, from the stomach out. A white couple walked past, arm in arm, tanned with travel. They glanced at him without acknowledgement. He smiled too late, resumed his walking.