by Tracy Farr
In this fugue state, random thoughts come. It’s the longest night of the year, tonight. Midwinter. An image flashes through Kristin’s mind: her mother’s stories, growing up in Norway, Saint Lucia’s Day, crowns lit with candles (the fear of them, and their beauty), lighting the year’s deep midnight, its darkest moment. Saint Lucia brings light. The year lifts from here, the days lengthening, though imperceptibly at first.
The baby sleeps again now, her mouth petalling sweet breath. Kristin pads back to the room she shares with Paul, rolls back into bed, is asleep before her head hits the pillow.
Let him let her go
He can’t remember walking back to the house from the beach. He can feel the sticky wet of salt water in his clothes. Seawater feels somehow heavier than rainwater, sticks to your skin more. He feels the rain freshen the seawater, dilute it, lighten it. In his nose is the acid tang of sick.
Kurt stands on the lawn. He can see through the windows to the kitchen, but it’s almost dark inside, just a faint glow that might be from the microwave, or the clock. The house is quiet, now. In the dark, in the quiet, he thinks about The Girl he saw and then failed to see again. He sees her head, her slender neck, the dark, straight, sleek hair floating, darkening the water around and about her. He sees her when he closes his eyes. That’s what he sees. A girl. The Girl. The unseen, always-seen Girl, slipping away.
He thought he’ d left The Girl behind, thought he’ d eased her from his dreams. He thought he’ d drawn her out in the comics. He thought the meds had let him let her go.
He opens his eyes. He stares down at his boots, their toe crust of grey river sand, their rime of salt. He swings one booted foot out in front of him. There’s little resistance in the grass, the lawn. The sound of it – the swish of his boot, the parting of the blades of grass, the slick of the moisture on the grass – all magnifies itself, in his imagination, in his mind, mixes with the distant sound of waves. He’s not sure what’s close and what’s far; what he feels and what he thinks; what’s heard, what’s seen, and what’s imagined.
Falling with the weight
Driving back to the house from the hospital, Iris is careful, even though it’s only a short drive. She sits forward in the seat, looking for animals on the road, or drivers coming out of nowhere. It’s not yet light; it’s that time of the morning when it’s deep dark night, darkest before the dawn. Her car lights make a tunnel of brightness ahead of her, and she drives into it.
When she’s only a few minutes from the house, the rain kicks in again, suddenly torrential, monumental. She flicks the windscreen wipers up to maximum speed, but they can’t clear the view. She slows to a crawl. She can’t see through the rain. It feels as if she’s underwater, or driving at a building she can’t see past. She indicates – though there’s no other car around – and pulls the car over to the side of the road, feels the gravel pull the tyres onto the verge, feels the pull on the steering wheel. She turns the ignition off, leaves one hand on the key, one hand on the wheel. The rain thunders on the roof of the car, drumming as if to break through. How can water be so hard? The sound is powerful and gentle at once, like stones tumbled by the ocean.
Iris sits, in the dead-dark, waiting for the rain to ease. A phrase from the hospital sticks in her mind, morphs to this: I have stones inside me. She thinks of kittens drowning in a sack.
Just for an instant she feels herself falling with the weight of this, as if through time, or water, or a window into light.
The rain stops suddenly. Iris restarts the car, turns the demister up to full, wipes the inside of the windscreen with her sleeve to clear the condensation that’s formed from her breath. As the view clears, she realises she’s pulled off the road just metres from the rise of the bridge, just before their turn-off. She eases the car off the verge, back onto the road, up across the little bridge, then turns left into their driveway, and pulls in by the house to park.
As she gets out of the car, she feels herself sink into the ground. Dampness seeps up over the sides of her shoes. The house, from the outside, is quiet, dark. The cars that’ d parked all around the house for the party have all gone now – there’s just her car, and Paul’s, and Marti’s. She closes the car door quietly. The beep of the lock sounds bright in the still night.
The rain cloud is off to the south, and the sky above her is clear for the moment, star-ridden. Everything smells of rain, washed fresh.
She unlocks the front door, and steps inside the house.
The beep-beep chirrup of the car lock wakes Luce up, a little bit, but she doesn’t wake up properly until Iris comes through the door, and nearly treads on her.
‘What – Luce – what are you doing love?’ Iris whispers. As if anyone would wake up.
‘I – uh – couldn’t sleep. I –’
Luce fumbles, puts her hands to the ground. She feels Iris’s phone by her side, slips it into her pocket as she stands up.
‘Oh, Lulu, I’m so sorry, I know I said I’ d call, but I forgot my phone. Of course you were worried about me! I’m sorry, love.’
‘No, I –’
Iris hugs her, and Luce is half asleep so she lets her. ‘Oh, you’re freezing! Come on, off to bed. You can sleep in tomorrow.’ Iris shakes her head. ‘Today. We can all sleep in today.’
Luce remembers why Iris was away. ‘You okay? The hospital?’
‘I’m fine. All sorted out. Nothing to worry about. A pebble garden in my gut.’ She puts her hand on her belly as she says it. ‘Gallstones. Not serious. Come on, off to bed.’
Luce is at the door of her room when Iris says to her, from where she’s fumbling and moving books and bowls and papers on the hall table. ‘Oh, I thought I’ d left my phone here. Did you see it, Lu?’
Luce shakes her head. Her hand in her pocket feels for the phone’s ringer, and flicks it to silent.
‘Nuh.’
‘Never mind. It’ll turn up. Night love.’
‘Night.’
Iris puts her bag on the kitchen table. She leaves the light off so she doesn’t have to look at the party mess everywhere. She can smell the volatile dregs of wine and beer. There are no clean glasses or mugs on the shelves. She finds a plastic measuring jug in the pantry, stands at the sink, pours water into it, drinks. She feels woozy from being up all night, and from the low-level pain meds they gave her at the hospital. She stands, leaning at the sink, staring unfocused out the window.
Outside, something moves. On the ground. Is it –?
She leans in close to the window, fogs it with her breath; she leans away again. It’s – something, on the ground, framed by the window. The shape lifts, an elegant arc of dark back rises up from the ground. Arms push up from the front and she sees a face – his face, her boy, her Kurt – pale in the scattered starlight as his shoulders heave and hurl, and he throws up in a dark torrent that disappears into the sodden ground underneath him.
The feel of him leaning
They’re in the kitchen, talking in quiet voices. Everyone else is still asleep. Kurt sits on a kitchen chair, a tartan travel rug around his shoulders. Iris has put a purple ice-cream container in front of him on the table, in case there is more vomit. There can, surely, be no more vomit. Iris is making tea. She has started washing mugs and glasses while the kettle boils. She puts teabags into clean mugs, tops them with water. She stands at the bench, jiggling teabags, watching Kurt. He has his head in one hand. The other hand clutches the rug closed at his throat. His eyes are closed, his mouth open. He stinks of bile. His wet clothes are in a pile on the bathroom floor. He’s pulled on another identical pair of black jeans. She wants to reach out and touch him, but she knows not to. Outside, there’s a glow of light in the sky. Kurt has been talking, but she can’t understand what he’s telling her. Something about the bay. Something he saw. She’s so tired. She imagines lying down on the ground outside, where Kurt was, but off to the side to avoid the vomit. She imagines the cool of the damp ground against the side of her face, like the cool side
of the pillow when you turn it over in the night. She looks at Kurt, who is looking at her now, as if he’s expecting her to reply.
‘Well – what were you doing at the bay, anyway? In the pouring bloody rain?’
‘I don’t really know. I was – I was just pissed. Like pass-out-in-my-own-vomit pissed.’
‘Clearly.’
‘Jesus. Alright. Sorry. Not something you’ve ever done.’
‘Oh, love.’ She reaches her hand out to his, covers it. His fingers are long, fine. His hands are cold. ‘I was just worried. Seeing you out there, I thought –’
She doesn’t know what she thought, and she can see the start of something – some kind of shutting down – in his eyes. ‘Look, all that matters is you’re okay. You can get rat-arsed if you want to, I don’t care about that. Just don’t do anything – stupid, when you’re pissed. Anything could. You could. Look, I don’t know. You could slip and go into the water. That’s how people –’
He makes a noise in the back of his throat, annoyance or dismissal or frustration. A warning to shut up. But she can’t.
‘Love. I worry about you.’
He shrugs his shoulders. His head drops a little lower. She thinks of her teenage years, her own quiet, solitary drinking; she thinks of wine drained from the cask in the fridge into a pottery coffee mug (the suck of the fridge door opening, the tinkle of wine filling the mug), taking the edge off school nights. She remembers drinking at the oval before school socials, passing vodka bottles and beer cans, the glorious discovery of those first bedspins and boyfumbles. It wasn’t often that she’ d slip up and get completely pissed in front of her mother, but when she did, she remembers Rosa holding her hair back while she spewed sour wine into the toilet, bringing her a bucket, putting it by her bed, tucking a towel under her chin to protect the bedclothes; bringing her aspirin in the morning. She remembers feeling shame, bile-sour, gut-wrenched, head-aching shame. And she remembers it not stopping her. Not for years.
He is saying it again, telling her about something he saw. Someone at the bay, there and not there.
‘What, you mean disappeared? In the water?’
‘I dunno, Mum. I dunno.’
He so rarely calls her Mum. His head is in his hands, his hands mussing his hair; but this is how he sits, this is not unusual, this is a normal stance for him. Still: Mum.
‘Well, if something happened, there would have been – someone would have got the police, or something. Wouldn’t they?’ She imagines it as a scene from a television drama, police sirens, TV cops in trench coats and perfect hair, crime scene officers zipping up a body bag. ‘Wouldn’t they? Kurt?’
He turns his head away from her and looks, his hair flopping over his eyes, towards the window. She wants to put her hand out and touch him; she wants to put her arms around him and hold him tightly to her. She wraps her arms around herself, instead, tucks her left hand into her right armpit, and her right hand into her left. She hunches over her arms, her neck curving, her head dropping, feeling her spine curving away from the back of the chair. She rocks, forward and back, but just a very little, so you’ d hardly notice – she thinks – if you weren’t looking for it. She is so tired. She unfolds her arms, lifts her head, uncurls her spine, and looks at Kurt, willing him to look at her, but knowing he won’t.
‘Well, was it – are you sure you actually saw something? If you were so pissed –’
He clenches his hand, digs his fingernails into the soft underbelly of his arm. His fingers lift; she sees white half moons, watches them flush to pink. Pull back, she tells herself. Go lighter.
‘You know – sometimes we think we see things, but they turn out to be not what we thought we saw …’ She trails off, realising she’s not making sense; she doesn’t have anything to say. ‘Oh, I dunno love.’
She swipes her hair back off her forehead, tucks it behind her left ear.
He gets up, shrugs the rug off his shoulders.
‘Going for a walk. I feel like shit.’
‘Oh don’t, love. Stay here in the warm –’
‘Fuck. I’m fine. Fuck! Don’t fuss! I’m just going for a fucking walk! I’m not going to drown myself! Jesus fuck.’
He slams the door behind him. She stands, goes to the window, watches his shoulders slope, watches him walk away, out through the side gate that leads to the river path to the bay. She lets him walk away. There’s nothing she can say to him. She doesn’t know what to say any more. She’s so tired.
She hears the sound of the baby cry, hears the bedroom door open, hears Kristin’s voice, then the baby sounds soothe from cry to contented gurgle. She remembers when Kurt was small, she thought she’ d never be able to protect him but, at the same time, she thought she always would. She was his protector. She and Paul were, both of them, but her most of all. She was his mother. Remember that feeling: when he was tiny, and she could hold all of him in her arms. All of him, held tight to her! And she could make it all better, always.
She remembers the feel of him leaning against her, when she was his safety, his world, his food and drink, his play, his sleep, his bath, his book, his story, his tongue, his word, his what’s that, his why, his breakfast lunch and dinner, his apple cut into boats, his table fort draped with blankets, his clean clothes, his new shoes, his tickling, his counting, his archivist, his inconsistent scrapbook-maker, his don’t do that, his garden buddy, his audience, his actor, his shouting mother, his bad role model, his inconsistent parent, his too tired to think, his doesn’t make rules, his makes rules, his doesn’t make rules, his walkover, his sheet-changer, his wake up at night and his singer to sleep, his doing all the voices, his back-patter, his worrier, his helper, his champion, his nurse, his cook, his scribe, his interpreter, his advance party, his problem, his solution, his excuse, his fan, his hairdresser, his stylist, his activities and entertainment officer, his disaster management expert, his trauma counsellor, his translator, his intermediary, his protector, his provider, his teacher, his student, his manager, his friend, his enemy, his understander, his not understander, his nervous observer, his never let go, his accommodation, his transportation, his photographer, his subject, his opponent, his team captain, his team member, his reader, his writer, his artist, his model, his researcher, his explainer, his question, his answer, his dictionary, his internet, his limit, his start, his where, his what, his why.
She puts her head on her arms on the table, and closes her eyes.
Deep grief, crouching
When Luce wakes it’s still early, hardly even light. She tries to go back to sleep, but she needs to wee. She rolls out of bed. On the way to the bathroom, she hears voices in the kitchen, and she listens, standing by the door like a sneak, standing in the dark of the hallway, behind the door that’s open just a crack.
When Kurt storms off, she races back to her bedroom, pulls on her jeans and hoody. She picks Iris’s phone up from the table by the bed. It’s showing three missed calls. Shit. But – it’s still early – the lady, when she’ d phoned the first time, had said nine o’clock, right, tell Iris to call any time after nine, and it isn’t even eight, it’s still practically night-time – so technically, technically she doesn’t need to tell Iris yet. She puts the phone in the front pocket of her hoody, and sneaks out the side door to follow Kurt.
She hangs right back, watches him walk out the gate to the river, and turn down the path to the beach, before she follows. As she reaches the gate, she feels the phone vibrate in her pocket. She pulls it out, checks the screen. Four missed calls. Shit. She presses the button on the top of the phone, and slides her finger across the screen to turn it off.
She follows Kurt down the path, but she’s busting, can’t concentrate. It takes her a while to choose a place, and her bladder knows she’s getting close and it lets some out before she’s ready. She squats down, just off the path, behind a bush. The air’s freezing cold on her bum, and it’s noisy when she goes, like a tap turned on full. When she’s done, she wipes herself with
her hand, and washes the wetness off by wiping her hand on the plants by her side, pig face and lupins, sopping with the night’s rain. She wipes her clean, wet hand down the front of her jeans.
She slips back onto the path and follows it to the bay. She stops there, where the path comes out at the top of the beach, and watches Kurt walk around the bay from the river mouth, and on out to the point.
Back at the bay, in the pale early morning light, it’s as if the thing he saw (the thing he thought he saw) in the dark never happened. The river still flows, faster than even a few hours ago, into the bay. He stands at the point, where he saw – where he thought he saw – The Girl, The Man, them both, then their absence. He knows that if he took off his boots and his socks, and took off his jeans, and took off his shirt and t-shirt and put them in a pile on the platform rock, and if – then – he walked into the water, then out further, until the water rose to his ankles, then his shins, to his knees then his thighs, then further still – he knows that it would be cold; and that he could not do that, because all he would think about would be The Girl, the girl he’ d seen, then failed to see again, that girl not gone, but always there, every night, in the dark at the edge of the frame of his dreams.
He doesn’t know she’s followed him (she thinks he doesn’t know). He stands there now, all thin and tight in on himself. Luce watches him from where she sits on the big flat rock. Her knees are drawn up in front of her, her arms hugged in tight around them, making herself small. She rests her chin in the space between her knees, where it fits, filling the gap. Her jeans smell faintly of wee.
She curves her back so her face goes lower. She sniffs. It’s not too bad. She can probably only smell it because she’s this close. She thinks that a dog might press its nose at her, might breathe in deeply, move its wet nose about, taking it all in, pressing at her. There’s no dog at the house, though, and that’s good, because Luce doesn’t like dogs much. She doesn’t trust them. They can smell fear, people say. They can certainly smell wee. She prefers snakes. The idea of them, anyway. She’s never touched one. Except the dead one, yesterday. She traces an S on the leg of her jeans. Snakes smell with their tongues, when they hiss. She pokes her tongue out, but it’s cold, so she pokes it in again. She makes a quiet hissing noise, her tongue tucked to touch the back of her bottom front teeth. Then she stops, in case Kurt hears.
