He quarter-turns. Won’t meet her eye, won’t see them. They wonder if he knows.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘This isn’t me.’
The air vibrates, the signal sings. Another train is coming.
Who, then?
She watches him get on it, doesn’t follow. The chimes go, and a machine-blurred and accented voice says, ‘Standcleardoorsclosing.’ Her breath corrects itself, and she glances at her wrist. His claws have burned her skin. They see the line of an old scar, the blur of a home-made tattoo beside it. Infinity. This slowing of the breath is a ritual, her way to safety. There is a hiss of doors about to shift and she takes a step towards the carriage, too late. They feel the wind of its leaving on her skin. Her eyes look for her reflection in the glass, but it’s moving too fast to see anything. Infinity is not available.
Absently, she reaches a hand to her neck and feels the life there, pulsing below the jaw. They flood through it, into her skull, and do what they can for her. Her breath relaxes, and the tightness loosens in her throat. They find an incipient headache, habitually placed, and try to unpick its stitches. I want to help, she said. Well, they could help too.
Several times they think they catch glimpses of him in the carriages, through crowds, on platforms through a window, but can never be certain. He’s always leaving as they arrive, moving on another track, travelling too fast to identify. There’s no way to call out to him, to make themselves visible. All that watching, and now he never sees. They wonder if he ever did.
They settle where they can for as long as they can, until the body shakes them. What is it that lets them stick around? This one, for instance. The body young, unfinished, still suffering its growth. So full of itself, its wants. And yet it lets them in.
The train rocks her at the hip, vinyl ripped beside her uniform where it was knifed open. She rests her hands on her thighs. Scabs itch in thin lines beneath the fabric. Her attention is with something concealed in the hem of the bra where it joins the strap, too tight a net over chicken-white flesh. She stares at an old woman standing opposite, and wrinkles her nose.
Prickling, she brushes something invisible from her leg. Chilled by the air conditioning? Aware of their presence? She looks over her shoulder at the nobody there.
She reaches into the bra where the attention tingles, and touches something warm. Brushing against it fills her with pleasure. It’s some kind of blade, they feel the shape of a razor under her fingertips. Hunger for it shudders through her. She watches the veins in the old woman’s legs, blue veins raised in pale paperbark. She might take the blade to them. Bloom rising from the skin. They wonder what it would be like, to open someone. Open him. Their desire and the girl’s desire interfere with each other. They try to wrest control of her, but she’s strong.
She doesn’t move. Her gaze crawls over the old woman’s face, which is in profile. The ear delicate, the hair so thin they could count the strands. She rests her eyes there. Inside her collar, the girl’s forefinger caresses her thumb, where a series of parallel marks remain beneath a scar. These lines shoot through her, she feels them in her spine, delights in them. Her feet react, tap rapidly under the seat, impatient. The old woman turns her shoulder, drops her eyes to the girl. Hot now, the straps too tight, she looks up into the milk of them. Blue like old china. Direct, and nearly blank. Unarmed as moonlight.
The old woman smiles. But she’s not smiling at the girl. Not looking at her, but through.
The girl is afraid, shuffles back in her seat.
They gather their energy, bring it forth. A longing to be recognised. The old woman comes for them. Puts her cool right hand to the girl’s collarbone, the backs of her fingers touching skin. The razor beats beneath. They can feel the girl’s pulse in her neck now, thick and fast. She pushes back against the seat, but doesn’t quite retreat. The threat fascinates her like any other hurt. A swollen warmth spreads through her, an unwelcome pleasure. Dry skin against young. Disgust and need embrace in her. This is an awful kindness.
The old woman tugs at the collar of the girl’s uniform, unfolds it from the neck and draws it out. When it is straightened, she pats it gently and smiles. Her mouth moves, the dry lips open, but she doesn’t speak.
The girl swallows, whispers to herself: ‘Omigod.’ Wriggles away from the old woman, eases herself in the seat. She turns her eyes to the glass but only escapes as far as her reflection. Her heart is like a bird concealed. She reaches her cool hand under the collar where the woman touched her, fondles the top triangle of her bra where the razor hides. Its power will return. That touch was nothing. She looks anywhere but at herself. They tend to her disgusted pleasure.
The exchange of a station, no sign of him, then the dark, then posters. The girl’s self-image vanishes against a display of wedding jewellery. Pink women grin. The heart glazed. The images ghost over. She wriggles again, the body struggling with discomfort. They give it back to her. They leave her alone.
In the seat across the aisle, a man. His body round-shouldered, soft. Brown hands fold together, push between the knees. His work-sore feet. They can watch the girl from here. Seeing her unease from the outside, they look more kindly on it. The roses in those cheeks. He lifts his eyes to the old woman watching, dips his lashes to her, the gesture respectful, a feminine observance.
The old woman turns to him. She watches him now with the same intent gaze that she laid on the girl. So close, so uncorrupted. They feel her recognition in him, tingling like a threat. They are sure that she has followed them across, traced their journey, watched them move. Now his forehead furrows, hands reorganise. He touches his watch but does not check it. Examines her expression. Meets her eye. The old woman gives him the same half-executed smile, and bends in.
‘There you are,’ she whispers. ‘There you are.’ Her mouth opens, shows the brown bloom in the teeth. She peers in at them.
They are here, near surfacing, rising to the gaze. But his body reacts too quickly, it sinks them. He reaches for a pole, gets to his feet. Offers his seat. She shakes her head, keeps her eyes on his. Brows folded now, a clever trouble. He glances down, relaxes his hands. Her wrist looks so thin in the cardigan, which half-conceals a narrow white band. He steps closer, letting the girl behind him blur past and shuffle for the door.
‘Where are you off to today?’ he asks, the voice sweet. Big smile, very kindly, not looking at her wrist. She covers it with her other hand regardless. Smiles back, but not the eyes.
‘Maybe I can help you,’ he says, and reaches for her sleeve.
‘You’re not him,’ she says. Vicious, then the lips go soft. He hesitates, examining her face. His body represses the dreadful tremor, which they thoroughly enjoy.
‘I won’t go back,’ she says.
‘Back where?’
She stares a long time, mouth working a puzzle. At last she offers her wrist. The scent of powder, of musk and lavender and rose. A plastic bracelet, and a name. The train is slowing.
‘Here we are,’ he says. He takes her arm and fumbles for something in his pocket, touches his smooth phone but doesn’t take it out. He leads her up the stairs towards the door of the train. They want to stay down here, look for Adam; they don’t want to leave the train. He grips her loose-skinned wrist, and they feel her resistance. ‘It’s okay,’ he says, a voice like roses. One strong thumb on the back of her hand. ‘I’ll get you home.’ He looks at her neck, at the collar of the cardigan. It’s inside out, the label tattered, the print fading away. The stamp of a hospital under the tag.
‘Home,’ she says, uncertain. She has already lost the place.
The doors open. The platform waits. He holds the panic in her wrist, restraining. They slip inside her, and her eyes go wide as she remembers. The body remembers.
‘Let go.’ She tears her wrist. ‘Let go of me,’ and he releases her. She doesn’t know him. She hasn’t seen them. She doesn’t even re
cognise herself.
The doors close, and they sink back with her into the train.
SYDNEY
The idea of going away crept up on him. Sydney went on with determined ordinariness, was overtaken by its usual summer pleasures, but Adam couldn’t become interested in any of it. His illness faded, but he stayed in and missed the parties, the funerals. The news moved on to other stories. They might have caught someone, or never caught them; he wouldn’t have heard about it. And what difference would it make, anyway? There would always be violence. Some people simply had it in their nature.
In the new year he got a job working casual shifts at a market research call centre in a dingy cement building down a back lane near Central. His supervisor, an ageing goth, wore sweaty button-downs, black t-shirts beneath thin white shirts. Adam was comfortable with a standard he could easily best. On his first day there, the goth told him that the pedestrian tunnel under the railway station had once been a cemetery. ‘It’s totally haunted,’ he said, tucking his hair behind a silver earring.
Adam said that he did not believe in ghosts.
‘Places aren’t haunted, people are haunted,’ the goth replied, giggling inexplicably. Adam didn’t get the reference, but he laughed along anyway. He hoped it was the kind of workplace where pretending to have a good time was prized more than meeting the quotas.
His mother told people he ‘worked in the media’. It had seemed a professional step, he had even written an essay about quantitative social science research once, but really he was only scouring the dregs of television advertising in what felt like its dying days. The questions were inane: had they heard of this product, seen that ad, would they be more likely just as likely less likely to buy this brand of bread as a result. Sometimes a question was tacked on the end about politics, immigration or crime, which would open the occasional floodgate. Nobody ever thought enough was being done about crime. The people who answered were unrepresentative; they were bored, lonely, bitter, or too submissive to say no. Once a man answered with ‘Fuck off, Geraldine,’ and hung up. Adam took the number off his call list.
It was easy, the hours were good, it was less money than washing dishes but more than the unpaid internships most of his classmates were doing. And at least he earned it sitting down. Within a few years these call centres would all be outsourced to Bangalore, or replaced by algorithms; for this reason, nobody had bought functioning headsets, or decent chairs, in a long time. They did not care what anyone wore. Even his supervisor ditched the button-downs after a few weeks, liberating the satanic t-shirt collection, cutting loose with the eyeliner.
Adam stared at the carpet while he asked word-perfect questions that became meaningless with repetition: sliced white high-fibre crime. The answers would eventually be scried somewhere beyond his pay grade to reveal a pattern. He listened to the murmur of fifteen to twenty other people reciting the same text in different places, with different intonations. It would have been easy to automate them out of existence. A program wouldn’t have to be cautioned for deviating from the script. For now, though, humans must have been slightly cheaper.
The voice in his ear was complaining about drug addicts. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he replied, hoping they would talk for a while and save him another call before break.
There was a breath at his neck. ‘Say exactly what is on your screen or the data will be compromised,’ said his supervisor. Adam turned to nod, but the goth’s eyes were miles away; according to the others, he had a problem with ice.
‘Three times I’ve been broken into,’ the voice in the phone said. Adam knew that I referred to his house, and not his body. But it sounded strange. The questions didn’t specify a definition of crime, but people always understood it as break and enter, theft. He wondered why, but could not deviate to ask. The frame was small; most people only spoke about the speakable.
He had not been back to the house, or the neighbourhood. He rarely thought about them. He got to work by train and walked the other way to uni, when he had to go; mostly the classes were online anyway. Once he had begun to avoid the street, those few blocks, it was easy to make the whole suburb disappear, to carve out a segment of the city and abandon it to some unreachable place in history. In many ways, it was a relief. There was no point looking back.
Adam could not stay at his mother’s house forever. She was already dropping unsubtle hints about a Dip. Ed. Lisa spent all her time at her boyfriend’s, was acing her studies, had switched to radiology. Good starting salary. He was two years older, and she would graduate before him. He needed to leave. But that wasn’t why he started saving.
One evening after work he caught the bus to Bondi instead of going home. He didn’t have his swimming things with him, or any clear intention, and when he got there he could see the ocean was too ferocious for any but the most committed surfers. Thunderheads were looming out over the water, the southerly whipping everything awake. He turned south along the beach, watched the surfers for a while, then followed the coast track. He had never been afraid of the water. He was ashamed that it intimidated him now, even if it was a rational fear.
The track went much further than he thought, but he enjoyed the feeling of moving his body, losing himself in the rhythm, the clean sensations of wind in his face and salt spray in his lungs. He thought he would find a bus somewhere at the other end. Instead it got dark, and the path went on and on, and the ocean showed no signs of calming. Then the rain began to pelt down, fat and hard. He turned and began to hurry back the way he had come, cursing, his feet sore, his clothes soaked through.
He passed cavities of coastal jungle that sank through the sandstone between expensive glass houses and the water that grasped at their feet. He passed carved hollows in the rock and strange sheds and the secreted belongings of somebody who must sleep out here, though surely not in this weather. He turned at a bend in the path and almost collided with someone. A figure had stopped in front of him. He froze still, their face just short of his own. Their eyes locked for a moment, unmoving, and in that moment he thought he knew them.
Rain streaked down his skin, into his eyelashes. Adam blinked the image clear. It was not their face, of course, it was a stranger’s. Something had reminded him. He could not see what it was. This man in his exercise gear had nothing to do with them. Still, he thought of their name, and almost spoke it.
At the same time, the man and Adam moved to one side of the path, then the other, caught for a moment as if in a mirror. An awkward dance that risked eternal repetition. Finally the man reached out, pushed Adam aside like something insubstantial, and hurried past him. Adam stood a moment, unable to move, his breath fast and shallow. As though he was the one who had been running.
He had known it was them, with the body’s pure certainty. But he turned as the man ran on, and it was impossible, foolish; just some random jogger caught in the wet.
It was a lapse of perception. A scrambling of the signal. A scent, or a gesture, had triggered a memory. The mind sought patterns, made connections that were not there. It was the only rational explanation.
The impulse to leave the city began to feel urgent.
After that incident, he saw them again and again. Often on trains, in that suspended space of travel, when he wasn’t focused on anything. He saw them in the distance, caught glimpses in crowds. On the station platform, more than once, from the window of a train moving past. They were always travelling in different directions. The same thing had happened with his father, but in that case he had wanted him to come back. He had dreamed of it, and in the dreams he’d been afraid that he would disappear before he could catch up to him. Or worse, that he would face him, and the two men would not recognise each other, that Adam would be older, no longer the kid his father knew, and that his father would turn away a stranger. He had wanted so badly to see him again; the illusion, if that’s what it was, had made sense.
This wasn’t welcome. He didn’t und
erstand why he kept thinking of Yun, when that part of his life was over. He wanted only to leave the past behind. Each time, the false recognition offended him. The back of their head across the street, the angle of a shoulder poised above a group waiting at the ticket machines, a loop of hair. Always a body in motion. Several times they had turned while he was staring, and something in him surged towards them, only to see that the limbs were unfamiliar, the expression strange, the error suddenly specific, and his stomach would sink, his shoulders drop, his lungs fall empty.
He began saving for a ticket, though he had no idea where he should go.
He was at uni when he saw a poster advertising English teaching jobs in China. No-one he knew had ever been to Beijing, and that in itself seemed to matter. As soon as he got the callback from the agency he told work he was quitting, though when he understood that the arrangements would take months he came back for more shifts. The agency would pay for his flights. It was all organised, the visas, everything. His mother was not as sorry to see him go as he would have liked. She thought it was a wonderful idea, teaching, though she did say that there was little point in his going, since Sydney was already turning into China: a remark he had predicted and decided pre-emptively to ignore.
Even his sister was nice about it. He told her to visit, but he knew she never would. Her life here had too clear a trajectory, too few discomforts. Things were becoming serious with the boyfriend; they were looking at apartments, drawing lines between acceptable and unacceptable suburbs. And what was Beijing to her, to any of them? They could not imagine it.
No-one there would know him.
It would be a fresh start.
TRANSIT
They learn to take their chances, to take risks. One man, a guard in uniform, spends minutes staring calmly at a screen, tapping out a rhythm between forefinger and thumb knuckle, before he pauses. Circulation poor, hands cold and ankles swollen. The rhythm is compulsive, backgrounded, an outbreak of the stress in his chest, his kidneys, the pressure rising inside capillaries. If they could read his mind, they might understand the source of this anxiety, but the language of the body has its own intelligence. They study the text of skin and heart and blood and muscle.
The Airways Page 16
