The Salted Air

by Thom Conroy

  WHERE THE DEAD ONES GO

  A half-hour later, I am sitting in Bruce and Joanne’s kitchen. Joanne and I are drinking coffee and listening to Bruce and Joanne’s daughter Ella explain to us the particulars of a collection of toys meticulously arranged on a small table beside the bench. As Ella explains, I find myself increasingly taken with her and the miniature world she has arranged.

  There is a police station, a church, a post shop, a jail. The houses are different sorts of toys. The jail is quite new-looking and appears to have laser cannons mounted on its roof. The church, on the other hand, is wooden and handpainted. It has doors on the tiniest hinges, and a small bear lives in the church. It seems, as I listen more closely, that Ella is not sure exactly what a church is, since, as she speaks, she tells us that the bear takes sick people in and out of the church.

  ‘And the dead ones go here,’ Ella says. She opens the trapdoor in a castle and drops in a plastic dinosaur as a demonstration. Immediately, she plucks out the dinosaur and says, ‘But he’s not dead.’

  ‘He’s the mayor,’ Joanne says brightly. A moment later she looks at me and smiles. ‘I need to get out more.’

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ I say. And I mean it, too. Ella and her world and her mother’s understanding of it are all wonderful. For a moment, I almost extend this heartfelt wonder to the father as well, but then I stop myself. Bruce simply cannot be wonderful. I will not permit it.

  THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON

  I met Harvey in a carpark, which strikes me as perfect. So emphatically unromantic that it comes about as close as anything could to Harvey’s idea of love at first sight. I appreciate his take on the whole thing, but it may be I am even less romantic than Harvey was, in that I don’t require the metaphysical opposite of romance in order to be enamoured. I am, as Harvey used to say, unanchored to conventional association.

  What was I doing in the carpark? I was on my way back from buying something for my mum’s flat. Something tedious. Yes, I remember now: a new bulb for her fridge. After ordering the wrong model number three times, the correct bulb had come in at last, not in the shop a few streets over from my mum’s office, as had been arranged, but across town at a shop by the waterfront. I found this shop, handed over the four dollars fifty, or whatever it was, and walked out with the bulb in my pocket. After so many weeks of problems with the order, it seemed anticlimactic to simply pop in and out, but that’s how it went.

  It was only September, but the day was hot and still, with just the inevitable sea breeze to ruffle the flags of the cargo ships. Harvey was doing nothing special. He was walking through the carpark in his painfully loose jeans, his dark hair lifting off his head almost as a single piece, like a pelt. I remember he was wearing a grey scarf. A masculine enough colour, but the style of it was all wrong. It was ribbed, for one, and thin. Obviously meant for a girl, but you could tell he wouldn’t have known that. There was something easy in his gait and something desperate in his eyes. No, I thought, this is not the kind of man to wear a girl’s scarf on purpose.

  He turned to me. I had been staring, but when he looked at me I was not embarrassed. I’m not the kind of girl to stare, but when I saw his face it didn’t seem like I was staring at a stranger but making eye contact with someone I knew. Sounds strange to put it that way, but it was true.

  I left Harvey’s company for my father’s house, dropping off the bulb en route. Seven hours had passed, but Harvey’s dark eyes were in my head the whole way back. My father came out of the house to meet me on the driveway and he shook his head.

  ‘You’ve fallen for someone, haven’t you?’

  I said I hadn’t, because until he mentioned it I didn’t know I had. Harvey and I had not touched one another, though I had wanted to. We’d only talked. Talked and walked.

  That night in my childhood bed I closed my eyes and saw his eyes again. I saw the sea behind his eyes and I saw his black sports jacket, worn and ironic and matter-of-factly sexy. I saw his eyes and the sea, and fell asleep with the two joined. Dreams turned everything around, and in the morning I had the impression of Harvey as a kind of marine animal. Something cult and vaguely monstrous.

  What came into my head over breakfast was the Creature from the Black Lagoon in a bowler.

  ‘What are you thinking of?’ my father said.

  I snorted out my porridge, laughing.

  THE EMBEZZLER

  Bruce comes home from work at 6.30. I hear him in the garage, and I swear I can discern the sorrow in his movement. Nothing is banged or slammed, but there is a slowness in his gait that makes me think more kindly of him, and I find myself looking forward to seeing his face. When he enters the kitchen, I see him before he notices me. This glimpse tells me everything. He is confident, with his prickly cheeks and his eyes that seem somehow sharp. I look at him, and without meaning to I think, He looks like an embezzler.

  Bruce is, in fact, an embezzler. For the past four years he has been embezzling money from the insurance company where he works. This is one of the things I know about Bruce that I should not know about Bruce.

  When he sees me, Bruce’s face changes so dramatically I think for a moment someone has opened the blinds.

  ‘Djuna’s staying with us,’ Joanne says. Impossibly, she’s smiling at me. As if I were no one special — or, worse yet, as if I were. She does not see her husband beside her and, therefore, has no idea of the expression on his face, the undisguised desire.

  But at that moment Ella comes bounding into the room with a lavender dress on, and Bruce kneels down to hug her. And now it’s my face that should be concealed. My face and the sudden desire I’m sure anyone could read there. There it is, I think, what I want. Bruce, yes, but also Ella. The two of them right here in my kitchen, and Ella’s lavender dress, Bruce’s prickly cheeks, his embezzling heart, all of it.

  DRESSED FOR HIM

  By the time the door to Bruce and Joanne’s guest room opens, I have been lying awake for over an hour, praying he won’t come. My fingers hurt from clenching. At the same time, I have been thinking about what I will do if he doesn’t. Sneaking down the hall to Bruce and Joanne’s bedroom is one thing I’ve considered.

  I’m dressed for him. Why am I dressed for him? I never dressed for Harvey, not once. And as Bruce silently crosses the room towards me, I think what a fool I was to pack this lingerie with its horrific lace. No, worse than a fool. A monster. I think of Joanne standing next to this man and smiling at me, and I need him to go away, to leave me alone.

  ‘Get out of here,’ I say. My hands are running down his back and I’m adjusting my position. I’m lying back on the bed. I want to tell him to go again, or say something worse — to scream, possibly — but my throat is too tight to make any noise.

  I can’t have him in this room with me. I can’t stand another second of him and the smell of him. I think this is a violation, this is rape, but at the same time I’m pulling him inside me.

  What I want is for him to hurt me in some new way.

  This he cannot do.

  DROWNING

  My parents and I went for a picnic at a reserve in the Ruahine foothills. A river ran through the reserve. It was crowded, music played from cars. Up on the cliff beside the river, kids were leaping. I thought how reckless this behaviour was as I waded into the shallows. I remember coming to a drop-off in the water. I could see there was a current, but I could also see all the other people in the water just upstream from me. I stepped out, my foot turning a rock as the current took me. I remember looking back and seeing my parents catch my eye. It was not as you imagine it will be: your father diving in with his clothes on, your mother running along the bank. They watched me. It happened that fast, you see. They were still registering the fact that I was being drawn away from them when I paddled to the edge of the current and got back to where I could stand. I was up the bank and walking back before either of them had moved.

  That’s what it’s like, I thought. We strut about imagining hero
ism and lucky saves, but we’ve got it all wrong. Catastrophe arrives when the air is warm and people are everywhere. You have a plastic bowl of potato salad in your hands, and the moment surfaces when you understand that absolutely nothing has been under your control all along.

  A MESSAGE FROM THE AFTERLIFE

  I am lying in the bed in my lingerie. I am listening to the shower down the hall, and I’m wondering who else is listening to this shower. It makes a terrible racket in the middle of the night, but somehow I don’t mind this fact. I hope someone wakes up. I hope everyone wakes up. What I want most of all is to tell Joanne everything.

  Ella is calling out now. She is awake and calling out for her mum and saying something I can’t quite hear. Joanne can’t hear her over the shower. Only I can hear her, and I consider going to her, too. The truth is I want to go to her, to comfort her and, while I’m spilling my guts, I’ll just say it — I want to have her for my own. But I will not go to her. I have enough sense left to stay put, to lie right here wrapped up in lace with Bruce’s sweat on my legs and his daughter calling out in the room next door.

  I laugh. I laugh because I think of Harvey. I imagine him tipping open the roof and peering in at me. He’s not hurt or offended, or even repelled, but merely amused. Of course, he may be a little bit repelled, but it’s hard to tell because his sneer is constant.

  He says, ‘You need to get over me.’

  ‘Christ,’ I say, looking up at the dark ceiling, ‘don’t you think I’m trying?’

  THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE

  In my first memories, there is the pantry. A tiny room lined with white shelves and stacks of tinned food. I remember the wonder I felt standing in that space with the sun falling softly on the wine glasses and on the golden-coloured two-litre tins of olive oil. The shimmer of the metal tops and the golden rectangles and the circles of glasses and the faint smell of nutmeg and dishwashing powder infused me with a sense of belonging, and whenever I think of my childhood I return first to our pantry. This seems to me like a centre, and the rest of the house, the elm in the garden, the neighbourhood, the ranges, the coast and the sea beyond are all arranged around this single point.

  MERINGUE

  The morning after, I emerge from the guest room only when Bruce has gone to work for the day and I have spent a good hour with my notebooks. I shower first, washing my hair and conditioning it. I pull back my hair and lotion my legs with pear and white tea lotion — the pleasure of staying at other people’s houses is using their personal care products.

  It’s not until I step into the kitchen and see Joanne sitting at the patio table outside the sliding glass door that I realise I had been hoping to avoid her. She works part-time in a GP’s office, and so it had seemed possible that I could simply emerge from the guest room to an empty house. That I could shift everything into my car and drive away. That I could leave this all behind, having never rung Hamish Lippleton nor chatted to Joanne nor laid eyes ever again on Bruce as he knelt beside Ella in her lavender dress. That strikes me as a happy ending.

  But now Joanne has noticed me through the sliding glass and is rising to come inside, and it seems I will escape nothing. Immediately, I accept this. I will offer no excuses. Yes, I will say, I have acted unspeakably and violated your trust and betrayed you in the deepest way I know, but at least I will own up to it now … But so what? This is my mother’s voice in my head — my mother’s voice testing me yet again.

  ‘Djuna,’ Joanne says. She says my name flatly. Then she steps out of the glare of light from the sliding glass door, and I see her face. I don’t know what she will say or even if she will strike me, but I intend to take it. I will not flinch.

  No matter what my mother says, I believe this is worth something.

  Joanne tentatively takes hold of the tips of my fingers, as if she might pull me aside to play some game we both loved as girls. Then, looking me in the face with her pink-rimmed eyes, she apologises.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘please, don’t—’

  ‘I don’t mean to get emotional,’ Joanne says. ‘I—’

  ‘You have a right.’

  She leads me to the breakfast table and we sit. She is still holding the tips of my fingers, and only seems to notice this now.

  ‘Did Bruce talk to you?’ she says.

  Did Bruce talk to me? I am confused, bewildered. I want to say, Bruce and I don’t do much talking, and when we do, his wife is a subject we generally skip over.

  ‘Because things are not — have not been — easy,’ Joanne says. ‘Bruce and I—’ She stops short, seemingly not wanting to involve me in anything intimate. It is not until this moment that I understand Bruce and I are not the issue here. Bruce and his wife. Bruce and Joanne. Bruce and the actual mother of his actual child: it is these people who are the issue. This man and this woman are who we’re talking about this morning while a used condom sits in a wad of tissue at the bottom of my suitcase. I feel disappointed. A little angry, even. A touch jealous. It’s repugnant of me, but I cannot help it. Here I was thinking that Bruce and I were centre stage when, in fact, we are not on the programme at all.

  ‘Ella has seen so many fights,’ Joanne says. ‘She’s seen too much. I wish I could take it back. I can’t, of course. She’s strong, you know that, but she’s still a child. What she needs is some break from all of it. Some time away.’

  Joanne draws her hands away from me now, suddenly, as if she’s somewhat repelled by my grip. Once they are safely on her lap, she says, ‘He’s not violent. Bruce, I mean.’ She grins horribly. ‘Well, he is violent, but not with his actions. He’s never hurt me physically. He wouldn’t. He just …’

  She rises now and fixes us coffee and we begin to chat. This chat is suddenly so very easy, fluffy like meringue. A moment ago a border was violated, and now it is being carefully repaired. We talk of her work — which she hates — and of the government — which we both hate or, at least, sternly albeit helplessly disapprove of and cannot imagine being re-elected — and even of Harvey, who is dead, and whose name muffles the conversation and sends us scurrying outside to the patio where, side by side, we drink our coffees and listen to the traffic and to the twitter of unseen birds, which seems somehow to belong with the traffic.

  ‘Where are you headed next?’ Joanne says.

  ‘East Cape. To see my father.’

  ‘And tell me, what is old Eugene doing up there?’

  To speak of my father feels like speaking of a prize possession or a favourite place. It’s safe ground, and I am grateful to Joanne for introducing him. ‘Don’t really know,’ I say. I laugh at this fact. ‘He moved someone’s furniture up there a while ago … I think I may be going to bring him home.’

  ‘Like a naughty boy who’s run away,’ Joanne says. She finishes her coffee. ‘When are you leaving town?’

  ‘Today.’

  This is clearly the wrong answer. Joanne’s face clamps up. Her eyes shrink on me. Immediately, I backpedal. ‘I could leave tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow, yes,’ she says. ‘Stay tonight, please. It’s Friday and Bruce will be out late. We can talk after Ella is in bed.’

  Heat and pressure spread suddenly across my chest, as if a hot-water bottle has broken. ‘No,’ I say. ‘I can’t stay tonight.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I — it’s — I told a friend I would stay with her—’

  ‘But you’ll stay for dinner and then for a while after that? Come back in the morning for breakfast?’

  I get a brief image of Bruce stalking the empty hallway in his boxers. The sight of him is unwelcome and something loosens in my throat. Something else — but perhaps it’s the same thing? — unfolds softly in my chest.

  ‘Breakfast is fine,’ I say. ‘I just can’t sleep here.’

  ‘You’re welcome if you change your mind.’

  ‘I don’t think,’ I say, ‘I’ll change my mind.’

  JOY

  When I was eight, my mother wrote about me in her journal. As
usual, her entry was addressed to me. Here it is:

  At a Playcentre reunion today, I was talking with some of the other mums when I noticed you among a crowd of children. Someone had brought along a boxful of paper-towel rolls, and the children were wielding these as swords. The children had split by gender and now the boys chased the girls, now the girls chased the boys. When I looked up and saw you, you were at the front of a pack of girls, running at top speed. What struck me to the quick was the look of unbounded joy on your face.

  It could be that my memory is a trick fabricated from my mother’s words, but I don’t think so. I believe I can recall that very day. What’s more, I remember the joy my mother describes. The rushing, breathless exuberance.

  If you asked me what I wanted most in my life, I would tell you, I want that day. My joy on that day.

  AT THE BAY

  Joanne is off to work, and I’m in her kitchen, wandering into the opening pages of ‘At the Bay’. I haven’t read the story for years, and I see now I’ve forgotten how it transports you, how it draws you into its dewy flowers. Here is a sea-blurred place I find myself longing to enter. And here is the shepherd with his whistling and the ‘ghostly flocks’ of his sheep.

  My mobile rings. I glance at the screen, see that it is no one I want to speak with, and put the phone to my ear.

  ‘Don’t call me.’

  ‘I have to. I have to talk to you.’

  ‘I’m in your house. I’m sitting at your kitchen table—’

  ‘Meet me for lunch.’

  I move the phone from my ear because I’m going to hang up. For a long moment, I’m sure of this.