Gravity Well

by Melanie Joosten

  I’m Len, by the way.

  Eve.

  She waits for the requisite jokes. Original woman. Bit of a sinner, hey? He seems the type, but the jokes don’t come, and they each shake their end of the hammer, holding it between them like a relay baton. Imagine if you could pass everything on so easily. Your turn now, I’m taking a break.

  Make sure you use the guy ropes, it can get pretty windy, says Len.

  She has to tear the plastic wrapping and price tags from the tent before she can erect it, arranging the head of her bed uphill. As if these things still matter. She piles all of the food into the tent bag and zips it closed before crawling into the sleeping bag and hooking the hood over her head. She tightens the drawstring around her face, not caring that it’s only mid-afternoon. She is not cold; she shivers. Closes eyes, tries for sleep.

  The reedy voices of children, floating through the nylon walls of the tent, wake her. The scuff of shoes on gravel, a cabin door sliding open, car doors slamming shut. It’s dark when she climbs out of the sleeping bag and uses the light of her mobile phone to find a can of baked beans and the loaf of bread. Fifteen missed calls, and the battery is about to go flat. I’m okay, she would type into the message box. But they can trace you these days; they can figure out exactly where you are. She left a note, anyway. Explaining what she could.

  In the campsite kitchen she tugs on the ring-pull, and the beans slurp out of the can and onto her hand. She eats directly from the saucepan, dipping the soft white bread into the sauce and folding it into her mouth. It’s disgusting that she can feel hunger; that she can eat. As punishment, she has bought only this kind of non-food: processed to the point it bears little relation to anything appetising. Food that will fill, not nourish. The sign above the sink tells her to clean her dishes and return them to their places, but she doesn’t wash out the pan — she leaves it sitting on the stovetop, the fork in a sticky puddle on the bench. She wonders if Len will come and find her later, his caterpillar face asking why she hasn’t followed the instructions.

  A cake of lemon deodoriser sits in a tray on the toilet cistern; gritty sand gathers in rivulets across the concrete, and soggy toilet paper attaches itself to her shoe. She concentrates on these details rather than anything inside of her. She washes her hands slowly, staring at herself in the mirror. She looks the same as she always does; when will her body catch up with events?

  Returning to the tent, she crawls back into the sleeping bag. It smells new and synthetic. Clean. It smells full of promise, and Eve knows that she won’t sleep tonight.

  Light appears from no particular direction; tent walls become a dull green that brightens as the sun rises. Eve’s shoulders and hips ache from the hard ground, and rolling over only gives temporary relief. How is it she’s so unable to put up with discomfort?

  When she can bear it no longer she goes outside, the day fresh and new and already serving admonishments. At the river, water bubbles and tumbles over rocks, unaware it’s rushing forward into the salty mass of the ocean, that it will be embraced then promptly dispersed. She bends and scoops, the sepia water becoming clear in her cupped hand, tasting woody in her mouth, trickling down the inside of her sleeve.

  Minutes pass. She looks at her watch too often, willing time to slow down. Begging the minutes to expand to hours, the hours to days — for everything to come to a lumbering halt, too obese to move, before changing direction and going the other way. Going back in time. She undoes the buckle of her watch and stands, flinging it into the water.

  Red river gums protected by the cliff wall line the waterway. A beautiful camping spot, with the beach just over the road, it has barely changed over the years. Her thoughts chase — if only … if only … — without coming to resolution. And she’s not looking for one. Just a few years ago she was lazing on this same riverbank, the trees dripping their leaves to the couch-grass lawns. Families returning from morning trips to the beach and children flopping about on the grass, sucking juice boxes as their mothers made sandwiches and hung towels. Snatches of conversation, fluting voices sure of an audience. She still remembers their names: Ava, Leo, Jacob, Harriet, Maddie. Easy to love, every one of them. At the time, Eve’s own belly was taut with pregnancy, being laughed at as she lumbered to her feet, ungainly and exhausted.

  Back at the tent she pulls on a pair of runners. She wants to take off down the beach, to pound at the firm sand of the receding tide. Her body aches for the release — how good it would be for her: adrenalin flooding her system, blood vessels gorging on oxygen. She won’t do it. Instead, she heads inland, walking along the skinny path by the river. She concentrates. Once, she might have attacked a path like this on her mountain bike, but those days are long gone. Now she walks steadily, one foot in front of the other, avoiding tree roots, embedded rocks, anything that could cause trouble.

  •

  Twenty years earlier, and not knowing a single person in Canberra, Eve had joined the university mountain-biking club. On the weekends they cycled out to Majura Pines, their bikes sluggish on the paved roads, but becoming slick over the pine needles. The first time she headed downhill she felt as if her rigid arms would pop from their sockets. She gripped the handles and clenched the brakes, releasing them in panicked jolts. It wasn’t a rock that upended her but a slide of gravel. Her front wheel swooped aside, the back followed, and Eve went the other way. When she hit the ground it didn’t hurt; rather, it was like a massive release, and she got straight back on the bike. This time she let her arms and knees sit loose, absorbing the bumps and letting the bike buck beneath her without upsetting her centre of gravity. She got to the bottom of the hill without further incident and let the bike drop to the ground. She had never felt so alive. She bought her own mountain bike second-hand from a guy called Stu, all bandana and skinny legs. She rode with him sometimes, their shouts grabbing at the trees as they ripped by, stop-starting over the rocks. She found her vocabulary whittled down to nothing but swear words, low down and drawn out or screeched to the sky. Found herself thinking of her parents, their relentless assaults on each other.

  You’ve a mouth on you like a fuckin’ dunny, said Stu, picking at a scab on his knee.

  You fuckin’ ought to know, she retorted, laughing.

  Her mother had died when Eve was fifteen, interrupting her parents’ seemingly endless argument. It’s a fucking discussion, one of them would say to Eve, when she asked them to go five minutes without attacking each other. In the following years, Eve’s father’s face sank into itself, fading in the silence — except for occasional outbursts where he would rage at the radio, the world, the neighbours. Never at Eve, but it was close enough. Two days before she was to leave home to study in Canberra, she found her father’s body in his armchair in front of the television. A broken heart, the doctor said. He was never the same after Shelley passed. Eve thought the latter was true, but doubted the former. Now it was swear words that brought her parents back to her, reminding her of the teasing way they would taunt each other. You silly old bitch. You old bastard. She relished the familiar words, grunting them as she urged her bike up the hill, shouting them as she skipped it downhill, imagining her parents slinging the insults at each other from where they leant against pearly gates.

  By the time Eve had sorted things out after her father’s death, the university semester had started and student accommodation was hard to come by. She moved into a single-room bungalow at the back of a house in O’Connor. It was advertised as a granny flat, but it was just a room up on stumps, with flimsy French doors that opened to the garden. She wore gloves and a beanie to bed in winter. The bathroom and the kitchen were in the house, which her housemates called the mainland; the bungalow was known as ‘Tasmania’.

  Four others lived in the house; they all seemed much older than Eve, though it was only a matter of years. A potter, a musician, a sculptor. And Nate, with his student politics and PhD. A giant beanstalk of a man, lumbering
and inelegant, who drew people to him, moths to flame. There were unfinished projects in every room of the house; in the living room, a clotheshorse covered in woollen tassels looked like an overgrown Highland cow had crawled through the window and given birth to a fall of painted terracotta tiles. Slabs of clay were stacked in buckets in the bathroom; they had to be swung out of the shower when someone wanted to use it. When Eve went to her housemates’ art exhibitions she always expected their work to be transformed by the white-walled gallery, but each piece still looked like a child’s homemade art project.

  They frightened her, these brash artists with their performative laughter and self-congratulatory talk, but they didn’t seem to mind Eve skulking about, hiding out in her room and emerging to cook only when she knew the kitchen would be empty. Her wish to fade into the background seemed to infuriate Nate, though, who would stride out to the bungalow at least once a week to demand Eve’s presence in the house, or that she accompany him and a dozen others to the pub. Sometimes he would lounge on her floor, leaning against the bed, telling her about all the places he had travelled to while doing volunteer community development work: building wells in small villages, and fixing solar panels to corrugated iron roofs. Other times he would invite her into his bedroom, pull her down beside him on the bed and demand her opinion of some band he’d just heard of. He peppered her with questions, and — perhaps because he didn’t mind if she answered or not — on those evenings, Eve’s words came out without getting tangled and running into one another. As long as she didn’t look directly at Nate, she found she could say things — interesting things, sometimes things that even drew his laughter — without examining them first for unintentional points of provocation. It wasn’t like talking to her dad had been, when she was always wary of inciting his rage, whether about some hurt he had long nursed, or some imagined slight his memory had magnified. After those evenings, though, Eve, alone again in the bungalow, would wonder if she had embarrassed herself. Spoken too much or too little. Whether Nate thought her strange or, even worse, felt sorry for her. And her resolution to seek him out of her own accord, to ask to borrow some of the CDs he particularly liked, would quiver and retreat.

  That first year, she was studying law. It had seemed the surest way out of her small hometown and away from her father’s misery — but after all the effort to get there she couldn’t find her way into the course, the dreary subject names managing to dull any intrigue the law might have held: Constitutional Law. Torts. Legal Institutions. Law of Obligations. In the evenings, she would close her curtains and turn on her desk lamp, trying to focus on her textbooks and not the sounds of her housemates smoking on the back deck. When Nate came knocking, she would half-heartedly refuse his invitations before giving in and following him on whatever expedition he had planned. Nate was all rhyme and no reason. His enthusiasm shot out in every direction at once, a radar signal of possibility and goodwill; he just sat back and waited to see what it would bounce off. He was always making plans and carrying them out: inviting random people on adventures to plaster Civic with posters calling for the government to apologise to the Stolen Generations, or building a raft to paddle the length of Lake Burley Griffin.

  One afternoon, Nate borrowed a friend’s white Corolla and drove Eve out to the national park so they could go bushwalking. As he led the way along the track, Nate explained the detail of his PhD in micro-financing and international development; how the greed of capitalism had to be embraced in order for it to be tamed. His research was laden with theory and discourse, and he explained it to her carefully, confident of her interest.

  He told her the names of plants and explained how they all worked together, the smaller plants huddling for protection against the trunks of the eucalypts. He pointed out the size of the trees that had survived the most recent fire in the area, the way their growth was stunted but still assured. Nate walked ahead, and Eve looked at the tightly spiralled hairs on the back of his legs, wondering if she found him attractive. His T-shirt rode up beneath his backpack and a soft roll of skin squeezed over the waistband of his shorts, surprising on a man so slim.

  When they stopped to eat, Nate lay down and put his head in Eve’s lap. She wasn’t sure where to put her hands and wondered whether she should cup his ears. Instead, she leaned back and put her hands on the ground.

  I feel so relaxed when I’m with you, Eve. You’re an excellent listener. Most people aren’t. Most people are just waiting for a break in the conversation so they can start talking.

  He had his eyes closed and a half-eaten apple in his hand.

  I suppose it’s because you’ve got a lot of interesting things to say.

  She cringed as she said it, even though it was true. The conversations she had with Nate were nothing like those she used to have with her friends at school. There was an urgency to all the things he told her, and the presumption that they really mattered.

  Well, let’s talk about you, Eve. Do you think you’ll end up as a defence lawyer or a prosecutor? I can see you working for the Crown, locking up those crims.

  And she let him talk on, surprised to think he spent any time imagining anything about her.

  In the mid-semester break, when most people had gone home to see their families, Eve rode out to Majura Pines. Without the other club members watching she went harder than usual, taking the more difficult forks and larger jumps, wishing she knew of a track that wasn’t as well defined. The air was cold and sharp, the ground damp. She wasn’t sure what made her fall, but she came to staring up at the spindly pines. She moved her legs, then her arms; nothing appeared to be broken. When she sat up, she gingerly shifted her weight from side to side. Just bruising. She heard her feet slipping about on the pine needles, and the wind batting at the trees. Somewhere a pinecone fell, rattling through the branches and landing with a thump. Hardly anything was moving, but in every direction was a busy syncopation of sounds, and as Eve wheeled her bike along the track, she found herself straining to hear a level of detail she had never before paid attention to.

  Later that week she bought a minidisk recorder, enthralled by its smallness, the coloured disks snug in plastic cases. She carried it with her everywhere, sometimes sitting the microphone out beside her on the bench as she filled in time between lectures, listening back later to the chatter of students walking past, their voices rising and falling with distance; the sharp swoosh of fingers on paper as she turned a page. Once, she clipped the microphone to her bra, capturing the beating of her heart as she ran up the stairs to the back of the lecture hall, the racing thump when the lecturer asked her a question, the unexpectedly deep rumble of her own voice, amplified by her chest, when she answered. At night, as she lay in bed, headphones on, the laughter and clank of cutlery from the kitchen across the yard would be banished, replaced by the thwack of Converse sneakers on brick pavement, the hurried clatter of high heels accompanied by a whisper of synthetic fabric against stockings. She would keep some of the disks as they were and record over others, marking out timed segments that could be filled with new sounds until the tracks were dense, some describing familiar journeys of her day, others a medley of commotion. She listened to them until they became emphatically familiar. Later, she bought a computer and loaded it with editing software, teaching herself how to edit and splice the audio, layering her sounds into pillowy landscapes, entranced by what she could achieve by nurturing a single sense.

  Nate would disappear for days on end. She wasn’t sure if he was sleeping elsewhere or if their paths just no longer crossed. Twice she sought him out, only to find his bedroom empty and the other housemates unhelpful. When he next turned up, he told her he had been visiting his parents on the farm.

  It keeps me centred, he said. I’m a country boy through and through. I just can’t concentrate here; at this rate, I’m never going to get my thesis written.

  Eve invited him to come mountain biking. He turned her down.

 
This? On a bike? He had laughed, gesturing at his body. I’d have to fold myself in half; my knees would be up over the handlebars.

  She put together a recording for him, trying to capture the heaviness of winter as it sank into the bush: eucalyptus branches wheezing in the damp wind, the sodden weight of ferns rotting in the undergrowth, the playful trill of currawongs. She left it on his bed, and for days it lay undisturbed on his pillow; Eve pushed aside her disappointment and tried to concentrate on her assignments. It was late when Nate came pounding on her doors, the glass rattling in the frames.

  This is great! I love it; it’s just like home. He made her listen to it with him, eyes closed on her bed, and they fell asleep like that, side by side.

  She thought she saw him once, cycling down Constitution Avenue, a helmet jammed over his curly hair. It must have been someone else.

  One day when Nate parked the Corolla, the sky was herding disappointments — clouds had been replaced by the grey resentment of an ongoing winter.

  Let’s not walk too far today, Nate said over his shoulder. Just far enough to be sure the mic won’t pick up any of the four-wheel drives.

  He wanted another recording; he was tired of the first.

  By the time they stopped, the rain had set in and Eve’s trousers were soaked through. She set up in an open space, wrapping the unit in cling wrap, leaving the microphone free.

  We’ll see how it goes. I don’t want to get the sound of raindrops hitting the plastic, but we’ll see.

  She watched the rain gather on her jacket, the creases forming rivulets that rushed to her wrists. When the equipment was set up, they crouched against a tree and listened.

  After ten minutes, Eve noticed she could feel Nate’s thigh against her own. She glanced across at him; he was staring at the microphone with a confused look, as though worried it might run away. She shifted her weight a little, not wanting to topple onto the soft ground. He was just cold, she reasoned, knowing that this wasn’t really true. She wasn’t cold. And he wasn’t just touching her leg, he was pressing against it; if she moved away, he would unbalance. She rocked forward a little, tried to judge where his weight lay, giving him a chance to move away. When he didn’t, she leaned away from him and let herself go. He fell against her, and for a moment they lay, Eve buried beneath Nate, her arms pinned and useless.