‘Let me come and get you,’ his mother said, and he found air for his voice. He folded.
It would only be temporary.
He arrived by train, walking the ten minutes from the station to the house with his overnight bag, past the dentist, the newsagent’s and the Greek place that was a banh mi place now, down the clean-swept streets of Federation houses, 1930s flats, past the carefully tended roses nodding in some front yards, the mournful dogs imprisoned in others, the grand old house with the concrete lions. It was the route he had taken home from school and he caught himself walking with a sort of lope, like the teenager who had walked this way so often.
Everyone he saw was old. The asbestos cottage on the corner had been demolished and replaced with the skeleton of a new house, four times its size. His mother’s yellow brick bungalow was unchanged, apart from its price. She would update him on that, he guessed, within the hour.
But she wasn’t home. He had not relinquished his house key. No-one was there to greet him. There was no food waiting for him in the kitchen, though it smelled of nutmeg and something sweet. He opened the fridge and stood staring in at the low-fat yoghurts and preserves, a neatly quartered watermelon wrapped in plastic, a half-devoured salad. Nothing looked edible. He felt like he was returning from a long journey, or had crossed into a future where he was not supposed to exist. It was cold in the house. The double brick kept its distance from its neighbours, kept things insulated, quiet. It was a place that felt natural to mourning. He took out a litre of low-fat milk, drank deeply from the bottle, replaced it, and closed the fridge.
His old room was more or less as he had left it, maybe a little tidier, a little less dusty. It must have been freshly vacuumed. He opened the window and heard an engine revving two streets away, the gunshot pop of its exhaust. Most of the people he had gone to school with would still be living at home. It was not such a disaster to come back for a while. It should be easy, like returning to the surface of the world.
‘It’s just for a few days,’ he’d told Kate, who had seen him leaving. She was actually pretty nice about it. He was not letting anyone down by walking away. And now that he was here, it was simpler to let that other life dissolve.
He lay down on the bed without taking off his shoes, and promptly fell asleep.
Woken by the sounds of his mother and sister returning home, he had to swim up from a dreamless deep to join them in the kitchen. They were laden with groceries, an obscene energy, life, questions. He confessed he might stay a week or so. His mother was triumphant.
‘I don’t understand you. I can’t wait to get out of here,’ Lisa said, tipping granola into a jar.
‘Leave him alone,’ his mother snapped. ‘He’s going through a terrible time. A terrible time.’ It was a link to the past. She had been like this before, with grief. She descended from people who had fled halfway across the world and changed their names to outlive such moments, which came for them regardless. Now she seemed to feel she had a claim on him.
‘I thought I would make my special rice,’ she said, ‘if you still like it.’
‘I’m not that hungry,’ he lied, knowing she would make it anyway.
‘You just need to rest,’ she told him.
He surrendered to her kindness, went back to his room. A hip knocked the sideboard in the hall that held Lisa’s tennis trophies, which rattled familiarly. Adam had dim memories of his grandparents, now present only as furniture; his grandmother’s childhood migration had given her an affection for solid things which she had passed – the things and the affection – to his mother. His clothes were folded neatly in an old chest of drawers that he looked forward to one day selling on eBay. His mother had removed nothing, he saw with approval. He opened a drawer, touched a shirt he did not recognise, though he knew it had to be his. He undressed and got into bed although it was still only afternoon. He would return to that blank, dark sleep.
As soon as he lay down the chest pain started. It was faint at first, but slowly it consumed his attention. This was the trouble with returning to a place: the body remembered old patterns, fell back into old habits. He tried to rationalise the sensation away. He was fit, young, there was no reason for his chest to tighten like a drum. He began to count his breaths, to focus on the oxygen, in and out. The engine noise kept interrupting, and he had to begin again. Finally he got up, closed the window, took an ibuprofen and lay back down.
Later they ate together looking out the window at the angled natives, which were browning in the hot weather. The rice was probably as good as it always was, but he didn’t really taste it. No-one looked in at them from outside except a solitary magpie, who landed briefly on the thinning grass, then hopped away.
At midnight the pain was much worse; he woke overheated, his heart beating strangely, his limbs afflicted by apparent paralysis. He knew that his mind was an unreliable witness, and waited for these sensations, concentrated in his chest, to disperse. It must have gone away, because he woke in the morning, not certain if he had dreamed it. He decided not to say anything.
He told his mother over breakfast.
‘Put it out of your mind,’ she said. ‘Try not to think about it.’
She didn’t understand him at all. It was not his mind that was the problem. It was his body that was struggling to move on, his body that had sustained the loss and could not now function normally. This was just how it had been with his father. As if something vital had been removed from inside him, had left a wound that ached and would not close.
‘It’s not about you,’ his sister had told him then.
He would do his best to forget.
A week later, Adam’s mother drove him to the GP who had taken care of him as a child. The doctor was semi-retired now, she explained in the car. Only worked three days a week. ‘She stays only for the old patients,’ she said.
Waiting for them to die, he did not say.
‘She’ll be glad to see you,’ she said. She couldn’t disguise the fear in her voice. For a moment he indulged a fantasy of heart disease, or stomach cancer, a young man felled tragically in his prime. He hoped that there was something physically wrong with him. It would certainly change the focus.
He didn’t notice the receptionist flirting with him until his mother began to question her. ‘Is this a good job? Do you go to uni for this job?’
The girl seemed unperturbed. ‘Actually I’m studying pharmacy,’ she said.
‘Wow! You need high marks for that, right? Adam is doing media communications. But he could have got into medicine.’
It wasn’t true. He tried to give the girl an apologetic look, and she sparkled at him.
‘I’m sure he just has a virus,’ his mother added, lowering her voice. ‘He is really a very healthy boy.’
Adam turned to the waiting room. A young Greek guy smirked at him from behind a magazine. He rubbed at his chest, though it wasn’t sore at all now. Nights were the problem. If he was lucky, the doctor would give him sleeping pills.
‘I was asleep,’ he’d told the officer, a decent, tough woman in her forties, quietly exhausted. She was careful with her pronouns, though he noticed the effort. He did not correct her when she slipped.
‘Were there any threats or harassment that you knew of?’ she asked him, checking the question from a list. He must have looked confused, because she locked eyes with him.
‘Unwanted attention,’ she said. ‘Hassles on Facebook, that sort of thing.’
Adam felt blank. ‘Not that I know of,’ he said.
‘Any visitors that might have seemed . . . unwelcome.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said.
She seemed disappointed, but not surprised. ‘What about anyone bothering them. At uni, or in the neighbourhood. Anyone that seemed to be hanging around, watching.’
Adam shook his head, wondering what she was implying. Then managed to s
ay, sincerely, ‘No-one.’
‘Can you think of any reason they were out so late?’
‘I’m sorry I can’t help,’ he said, which was true. He swelled with feeling, just for a moment. But the officer had already finished with him. She had seen that he knew nothing, seen it in his face before he spoke.
‘It might be pericarditis,’ the doctor told her screen.
He looked at her, perhaps helplessly. He had been thinking of the autopsy.
‘Your heart lives in a bag,’ the doctor sighed, ‘called the pericardium. It can become inflamed. Just happens sometimes. Take anti-inflammatories for a week. If it gets worse, come back and see me.’
‘What about the insomnia? Should I take something for that?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘It’s probably just anxiety. You’ve had some trouble with that in the past, I recall?’
Her mouth was tight. The kindness he remembered had been for a child.
‘Not since I was a kid,’ he said, defensive.
‘How is university? Are you coping with the workload?’
He realised that his mother had not told her what had happened. He could not explain it now, could not put into words what had been torn from him. He did not have to. He could still protect himself.
We must go on as if this never happens.
He told her he was fine, and left without a prescription. Something about the doctor calmed him; after seeing her, he began to be able to sleep, and a few days later he phoned Marita and let her know that she should advertise the room.
‘My mother’s been ill,’ he lied. ‘She needs me. Anyway I can’t really afford it.’
‘That’s fine. We’re already looking for someone for the front room anyway,’ she said. ‘Someone’s on their way over now, actually, I have to go. When will you come and get your stuff?’
The front room. Adam had not realised they would be erased so soon, so completely. Yun’s space would be reoccupied, the traces of their life removed; reality would close over the missing place like skin. The evidence that was left of a human being, of their private worlds, had to amount to more than one portable clothes horse and a beaten-looking white desk. A few novels, microbiology textbooks, some clothes. He supposed these things were already gone, taken by the grandparents he had glimpsed once waiting for them in an ageing station wagon. They had never set foot in the house.
‘Maybe Saturday,’ he said, ‘this Saturday or Sunday, I’ll see if I can borrow the car.’ He looked up and caught his sister’s expression. Slightly mocking, but directed at her screen.
He reached across the counter for the painkillers. His pain had not gone away completely. It had merely shifted its position in his body, trying out new placements: now inside the front of the shoulder, now at the base of the spine. One of those things, the doctor said. He had not known his heart lived in a sack, or that a single blow to the head could burst an artery. That was all it took. The blow, or the impact of their skull against the ground. Were all bodies really so vulnerable? It was crazy to think that a person didn’t really need to know how they worked in order to go around in the world alive. He was held together by mysterious procedures, fragile membranes. There were so many things he hadn’t heard of that could go wrong.
Marita answered the door with her hand on her hip. The new flatmate drifted out of Yun’s room, a tall, square woman wearing a man’s tweed flat cap. She was polite enough on introduction, but not warm. Marita almost hugged him, but must have thought better of it; she sighed and said that she would leave him to it. Adam glanced into the room before heading upstairs, but there was nothing there he recognised.
He hardly recognised his own things. After his grandparents’ anchoring furniture, these objects looked like optimistic garbage. He had found most of them on the street to begin with. The clothes in milk crates had always gestured at impermanence. He was ashamed of it, but annoyed also at the persistence of the material, the weight of belongings that had to be carted from place to place. He picked up library books he should have returned weeks ago. A photograph of his father, taken before illness made him into a ghost, unframed and now – he saw with a pang – wrinkled from the house’s damp. He slipped it inside a book, not the library’s, not one he remembered buying. His books barely filled a box. He took sheets, a blanket, a bag of clothes. He stuffed his swimming shorts into a pocket of the backpack. The chair and desk he decided to leave behind. Someone would use them, or put them back out on the roadside.
These objects did not hold him. He could leave them behind; he was free.
On his way out the door he glanced again into their room. A pink and grey quilt, a mirror, a supply of pens, a white cowboy hat. Had he expected them to reappear, simply because he was looking? Adam knew that he should feel something, standing there. He felt the absence in him, like a cold body of water, and found it reassuring. He backed from the room, pushed the front door aside with a foot and carried the box out to the car. He let the door close behind him without saying goodbye.
A couple of days later Marita texted him to remind him he had forgotten to return the keys, so he taped them to a piece of cardboard, put them in an envelope without a note, and sent them by post. Got the keys, thx, she texted him a few days later. You ok? He didn’t reply. What was the point? They were never really friends. He would not need to go back to the house again.
A few days later she texted him the details of a protest march, but since it was the uni holidays, he wouldn’t be travelling in that day. He would reply to the message later, he decided, and picked up a book that had got mixed up with his things, a second-hand copy of Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. He thought it might have belonged to Yun, but it wasn’t signed and there was no way of asking. He had been carrying it around but could not concentrate on it, never got past the first couple of pages. Instead he watched long hours of television news, a notebook on his lap in case he saw something that could be used as evidence in class. The notebook stayed empty. Eventually he switched to cricket.
He sometimes woke to a burst of noise, expecting disaster, to find that a wicket had fallen, and that he was alone in the house. His mother was still working at the high school, and even though she was no longer co-ordinating a year level, there were endless meetings as the summer break approached; she was rarely home before evening. Lisa was usually out, so the house was often empty. He wandered barefoot, stopped in the door of his mother’s room. She would not be back for hours. He stepped inside silently and opened a drawer. Her clothes lay neatly folded, colour-coordinated, with nothing of his father’s interspersed. He placed a hand between two cotton shirts, but the allure had gone stale.
He searched again for traces. His father existed in the house only in photographs worn anonymous from looking, and, here and there, repairs. Adam remembered the spots where wood putty or silicone sealed gaps, hiding them from those who did not know they were there. He remembered a bolt that attached the handle to a kitchen drawer, the one that did not match the others. He had been looking for signs of him for more than a decade. New evidence would not appear now. But he went on searching anyway; it was a compulsive kind of accounting. As if an innocence might be restored by it.
And yet he was innocent, wasn’t he? He stopped, his fingers curved around a door’s smooth handle. He had dealt no blows, he had made no threats. They had found no evidence of that. He had simply followed his impulses, followed his eyes. Actual harm was something beyond him. It was something vile, inhuman.
The march didn’t make the TV news. He forgot about it until he saw the photos on Facebook. End violence against women, said the main banner. He scrolled past it without reading the comments.
SWEETHEART
They search the streets, they practise moving. The city soothes itself with rain, then lies sun-drunk. Bright days where bodies are lazy, recline on the grass watching boats sail out the throat that suc
ks the ocean. Extraordinary sounds. Lorikeets. Aeroplanes. Incautious voices. Singing. Wine. Collisions, exchanges. The stains people leave on other people’s skin.
The moment, the body, keeps overwhelming them.
In the wrists of a man walking by the harbour wall, who takes them out along the rim of the land, picking up speed, the breeze in his hair, until he rests by the huge bolts of the bridge, looks up at an old stair with metal rails. Asthmatic lungs about to crush. They rush out into a jogger who takes them two by two with no excuse me. Then the young man wheeling a trolley of milk on the road above, dimly aware of the jogger collapsing as they turn the corner and enter the rear door of a café that sits at an angle between a series of old houses and a pit of construction. Not enough people around. They want crowds, the food court, traffic, people close together. They remember the sudden jolt of awareness in the bus on Parramatta Road. The chill of the morgue. That had been Adam, waiting outside for them, as if he knew they were coming for him. The stars. Months or years ago. They don’t know what time means anymore. So much movement since and distance. Each body its own countdown.
The milk man pauses to watch a spiral of air, the leaves rising and spinning, caught in its wind.
‘Apwape,’ he whispers, and waits for it to pass. It drops the leaves, moves on unseen, and he pushes the trolley on, one hand on a crate to steady it. Slow longing in him for something they can’t read. Slow loss and quiet rage and gain.
His body obeys its better strength, pushes the sack truck through a door and into the cool. Somewhere in him, will becomes coherent, acts. He stops to look at a receipt and stares up at a complex of exposed pipes along the damp wall of a building. Caught between life and death. Desire and action. The space of a breath. It’s hard not to fall for every body.
The milk man finds his door. He looks at his reflection as a woman signs for the delivery. His eyes rove over slender muscle, milk-dark skin. A longing for beauty that flares and fades. Does he see them? They are a spark, perhaps. They feel the desire in his body. A desire to take flight, to cross over. So they fly for him.
The Airways Page 13
