Out on the street, he walked in the direction of the city. Anger propelled him past the bus stop and then past one, two, three pubs and a backpacker hostel. He could not stop or slow or even shout. He avoided people walking ahead by taking the far edge of the sidewalk, dropping down into the gutter now and again, moving towards the oncoming traffic. Stepping back onto the sidewalk when a truck or bus got close.
At Railway Square the foot traffic thickened and he was forced to slow his pace. He heaved air into his lungs and a stitch pricked his right side. He doubled over, but kept walking. He noticed he was soaked through with sweat. When the stitch passed, he straightened and walked as fast as he could, glad that anyone who met his eye looked away quickly and got out of his way.
Adam walked through Chinatown and into the CBD, past the Town Hall and Queen Victoria Building, the sidewalk slanting ever slightly downhill, past office blocks and stores selling fluffy koalas and green and gold baseball caps, more offices and pubs and then the high-end stores and expensive hotels, on past Circular Quay and then into the Rocks and he remembered this from his former life, remembered walking this cobbled path late at night, walking up onto the grassy hill at its end, gazing out at the black water and the Opera House and then lying on the grass and looking up at the famous bridge and she was there with him, so proud of the damn city you’d have thought she built it herself.
He collapsed onto the grass and sucked air into his lungs. A light breeze kicked off the water and over his burning skin. As he watched the water, a Japanese bride in an enormous white puff of a dress floated past on board a candy pink barge. Just before she floated from view, a man in a tuxedo appeared behind her and covered her eyes with his hands.
Nothing has changed. The thought hit him like a stroke. He’d chosen a course that took him far from all that he’d been raised to follow, and then life – or death, actually – had spun him around and dumped him right back where he was before. It was as though the whole thing, from the first smile to the garden wedding to the hospice, was another of his extended vacations and now he was back to his real life, ready to drift on to whatever came next.
The rage surged, filling his belly and chest. It was so unfair. When you take a stand, when you make a conscious, committed, passionate choice, then you should have to live with it. You should be allowed to live with it. Forever.
Forever was the point, wasn’t it? That’s why you got married or, as in the case of almost everyone he knew, that was why you didn’t. In his childhood home, marriage was considered to be akin to slavery or prostitution, but that belief did not hold up past his mid-teens. He understood that the oppression his mother and her friends described was real, but not for them or for any woman he had ever met. Their idea of marriage was as hyperbolic and inane as that of the great American novelists whose wives were always shrews with ever-expanding arses and ever-shortening apron-strings drawing them away from life, trapping them in the small and domestic. Adam saw marriage as something entirely changed. Something unnecessary, but harmless.
As for love, he hoped to find a woman who he wanted to hang out with after sex. Someone who, after the kissing and caressing and an orgasm or two, would have something to say that interested him. He thought this was what people meant by love: good conversation with someone you liked to fuck.
But then, Eugenie. Almost immediately he understood that everything he’d ever thought about love was rubbish. His view of marriage as unnecessary was strengthened; nothing external to the two of them could make the slightest difference. Except, Eugenie cared so much about being married that rejection of the institution would have constituted a rejection of her. And so he became a husband and then, in time, the unimagined widower.
The thought of being identified in this way was comforting. He saw the years unfurling ahead of him, and he was always married to her. Not unchanged then, not entirely.
He stood and felt, for the first time in months, ravenously hungry. He hadn’t grabbed his wallet when he fled the flat so he walked back through the Rocks and turned left past Circular Quay train station to the tourist strip he remembered from his last visit. There, past the postcard booths and boomerang vendors were the golden arches. He’d learnt as a young backpacker that he could get by in any city in the world without a penny as long as there were dumpsters and McDonald’s.
Inside, he spotted a vacant booth which had not yet been cleared. He sat, and picked up the empty coffee cup, holding it close to his face as though about to take a sip. The discarded newspaper in front of him shouted about dead Palestinian children. Adam flipped the pages, keeping an eye on the counter. When all the servers were busy, he sidled up and filled the cup with hot coffee from the refill station.
As he headed back to his table, a toddler threw herself in front of him, kicking her legs and screaming. The mother, with barely a sigh, hauled the child onto her shoulder and trudged out of the restaurant. The kid had left behind three chicken nuggets and half a serve of fries. Adam scooped them up.
He thought about his friend James who was going to be a pilot but who got hooked on crack a month before he graduated from high school. Within weeks he went from being the smartest, most driven guy Adam knew to being a shuddering mess who’d steal your wallet even as he begged you to give him a cigarette. He spent most of his days harassing the tourists who took a wrong turn and found themselves in the Tenderloin, and most of his nights blowing slightly less messed-up crack-heads for a share of their stuff.
Adam had never been able to understand what had happened to James. He always assumed there was some trauma in his past, something that ate away at him and caused his eventual downfall. It just wasn’t possible, Adam had thought, for a person’s entire sense of self to disintegrate in just four weeks.
Now he understood that it takes far less than that. It takes an instant. One moment in time, during which you wonder what the point of it all is, and allow despair to take control, and that’s it. You lose the ability to imagine the future and if you can’t imagine the future then there’s no harm in anything.
The cold chicken and hot coffee calmed him. He would find a washroom, clean up as best he could. When he got back, Katie would be sober since there was no booze left in the house and she was out of money. He would talk to her, tell her he appreciated how good she’d been to him but he needed to get his act together. He would sleep in his own room tonight. He would lock the door and not come out until morning. He would spend the time planning the next day, and the next day he would spend preparing for the one after that.
Katie heard the front door slam. She held her breath and listened to the apartment. Adam was gone. She got up from her bed, sat at the dresser and stared at herself in the mirror. She grabbed her cigarette lighter and held it on until the safety override kicked in and the flame flickered out. Fast, before the metal cooled, she pressed it to her left cheekbone. Her hand shook; she held firm. She counted to sixty then dropped the lighter. Tears spilled down her face, stinging the fresh welt. She flicked the lighter on again and repeated the process on her right side. Her resolve failed before the sixty seconds were up, but it was enough. The skin puckered and shone.
Her face looked almost right. Lumpy, scabby skull, branded cheeks, swollen eyes. The forehead, smooth and pale, didn’t belong. Her hands were shaking. She couldn’t hold the lighter catch down. She tried half-a-dozen times, then drove the warmed metal into her forehead again and again until the skin broke. She pressed her hand to the bloody spot and breathed in out in out in out.
She was aware of her slowing pulse, her clearing head. Aware that her brain was processing what had happened, being reasonable, speaking to her through her nerve endings saying, you’re out-of-control you burnt your face it hurts and what have you achieved only hurt and people will ask what happened and you will tell the truth or you will lie and it will still hurt and they’ll still think you’re crazy except look how rational you are not crazy at all but acting out to get your own way get rid of the man get rid
of the people who expect you to work and clean up after yourself and act like an adult it hurts goddamn you – Katie told her brain to shut the fuck up.
She rose shakily and dug the portable stereo out from underneath a pile of clothes in the corner of her room. She found a Sonic Youth CD in the jumble on her dresser. She turned the volume up all the way, until the air was as jagged as her insides.
She rummaged through her drawers and found a tube of anaesthetic cream that, according to the label, had been prescribed for her in December last year. She picked the crust from the lid and smeared the cream over her burns then danced to the kitchen and washed down three aspirins with a mug of water.
The music and the aspirin and cream worked enough to allow her to dab foundation over the burns without too much pain. She wrote a list and mentally mapped out her path. She remembered to put on running shoes and clothes from the dirty laundry basket and to take a green canvas shopping bag. She strode out into the bright and exciting morning and felt organised and purposeful and sane.
12.
A madman haunted Harris Street. He had thick white hair and a matching handlebar moustache. He usually wore a grey three-piece suit, but Graeme had also seen him dressed in beige slacks and a navy blazer. The madman waited in bus shelters and when someone drew level he yelled and swung his walking stick out in front, barely missing the skull or arm or pram of the passer-by. Sometimes he took up a post at the pedestrian crossing near the TAFE and shook his stick at the passing cars, shouting all the while. Graeme had passed him countless times over the past few years, but had never been able to make out the man’s words.
Today, when Graeme saw the madman hovering at the bus shelter at the top of the street, it struck him as intolerable. He approached with a smile on his face and hands raised in surrender. ‘Oi!’ he said. ‘Can I speak to you?’
The madman sucked in his breath and looked around furtively.
‘I heard you calling out, but couldn’t make out what you were saying. I’d like to know what it is.’
‘And why would I tell you?’
‘I don’t know. I’m sorry. Ah, who are you speaking to?’
‘They know.’ The man nodded. ‘They hear me, but they pretend they don’t. Always rushing about. Ungrateful buggers.’
‘Maybe I could –’
‘No! I can’t help you. I’ve got enough to do as it is.’ The man pounded the ground with his stick. ‘Stop bothering me now.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Graeme said, and walked on.
Katie greeted him at the door with a glass of white wine. In the background a girl croaked out ‘King of the Road’ like it was a dirge.
‘Welcome home,’ she said. ‘Dinner will be served in half an hour.’
‘Your face.’ Graeme peered at it.
Blisters on each cheek stretched with the tension of her grin. An oversized sticky plaster on her forehead warned of worse.
‘It’s nothing.’ She forced the wine glass into his free hand. ‘Now, you relax, put your feet up. Leave everything to me.’
Graeme watched as she skipped back to the kitchen. She was wearing a red dress of a style Graeme recognised from his youth, and she had a navy and white polka-dotted apron tied around her waist. The effect when combined with her shaved head and bare feet was comical – as long as you couldn’t see her injured face.
He headed to his room and placed his briefcase on the desk. There were things he needed to do. Reading to get through, decisions to be made.
‘Graaaaeme.’
He carried a clean shirt into the bathroom and wiped his underarms, neck and chest with a washcloth. He put on the clean shirt, placed the dirty one in his laundry bag and then returned to the living room.
The coffee table was set with four white dinner plates, four champagne flutes, silver cutlery, burgundy-coloured candles and matching napkins. A cask of chardonnay sat beside a sparkling clean ashtray. Katie hovered, watching him, so he smiled and took a sip of the wine. It was warm. ‘Looks lovely,’ he said.
Katie beamed. ‘A man deserves to come home to a well-set table and a hot dinner after a hard day at work.’
‘Katie, as nice as this is, it’s not necessary. I usually eat in my room. Catch up on paperwork.’
Her eyes and smile widened. Stretch marks appeared on the sticking plaster on her forehead. ‘Fine, fine. No problem. Don’t feel you need to eat out here on my account. It’s your home, too. Whatever you like. I’ll just serve up and if you want to eat it in your room, or not at all, that’s okay.’
‘No, of course I want to eat dinner with you. I was only saying you needn’t make a fuss for me. I’m not used to it.’
‘Well, get used to it, Mister.’
She bustled off to the kitchen, humming a different tune to that coming from the stereo. The room smelt sweet, like freshly cut apples. He noticed that the magazines had been stacked in three neat piles and placed on the floor under the lamp table. The carpet bore faint track marks from a vacuum cleaner.
Katie returned holding a large platter over her head. ‘Ta da! Hope you like steak and kidney pie?’
‘Love it.’
She served them each a slice with a scoop of grey mashed potato. Graeme had to bend at the waist and slump his shoulders to reach the low table. After an awkward minute of trying to cut a bite-sized chunk from the pie, he gave up and raised the entire slice to his mouth.
It was rubbery. It was also filled with curried chicken. He chewed as normally as he could, aware that Katie was watching him with wide, tired eyes. ‘Mmm,’ he said, cringing at the way it came out, like a parent pretending to enjoy a toddler’s mudpie. He risked a spoonful of potato. It was lukewarm and lumpy. He swallowed without chewing and smiled at her rather than risk another patronising comment.
‘More?’ she offered, when he had managed to get down half his serve. She had eaten only a smidgen of potato herself. Her wine glass was empty.
‘Not yet. Um, will Adam be joining us?’
She filled her glass and topped up his. ‘Who the hell knows.’
‘Maybe we should save some for him?’
Katie pushed her plate to the far end of the table. She dug around in the folds of her skirt and produced a cigarette. ‘If you want.’
The croaky-voiced girl on the CD had switched to punk and it took Graeme a moment to identify ‘Tears on my Pillow’.
‘You must enjoy living here,’ he said, too loudly. ‘So close to everything.’
‘It’s okay. Gran lets me stay free, so I’m not complaining.’
‘That’s generous of her.’
‘She feels responsible for me, I guess.’
Graeme nudged his plate away. ‘Why is that?’
‘Because her daughter ditched me when I was thirteen.’
‘Your mother?’
‘If you want to call her that. I can count on two fingers the number of times she made even the slightest effort to be worthy of the name.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘It’s not like she was abusive or anything. She was always just trying to fix me.’
‘Fix you how?’
‘Oh, you know, I didn’t talk much, stayed away from people as much as I could. I wasn’t, like, bookish or anything – I just didn’t get other people. I didn’t know how to talk to them; I’d always say something and freak them out. My Year Six teacher told my mum I had a negative effect on my classmates and she decided it was her fault. Reckoned she’d stuffed everything up, didn’t know what she was doing and how could she be expected to since she was only sixteen when she had me. Gran got really pissed when she said that, because she was only seventeen when she had Mum. Anyway, I guess Mum thought that she could make up for it by giving me extra attention, coaching me and stuff before I started high school. It didn’t work, though. I think it made me worse.’
‘What do you mean? How was it supposed to work?’
Katie picked up her fork and stirred the potato on her plate. ‘I had this notebook
and I wrote down all the things Mum told me. “Show an interest in other people.” “Be generous with compliments.” “Always have three topics of conversation prepared in case of silence.” But I don’t know how to ask questions without being pushy or when to stop with the compliments. I came across as insincere or inappropriate or just bloody insane. I went from being a silent freak to a chattering one. And you know, even though I can, like, analyse the way I was as a kid, I’m still that way. I see it but I can’t stop it.’
You’re still a kid, Graeme was going to say. It’s normal at your age, the doubt, the self-consciousness. But she tilted her head and the light caught the shiny blister on her cheekbone and his words fell away. ‘Still what way, Katie?’
She stuck out her tongue and panted. ‘Like a puppy. I feel myself doing it and I can’t help it. I can’t see until later where the place was that I should’ve stopped. Like last night, I don’t know why I kissed you. I saw straightaway it wasn’t the right thing.’
‘It was fine.’
‘But it wasn’t really, was it?’ She drained her glass. ‘The kiss, this dinner. It’s too much. The thing with Adam . . .’
‘Did Adam hurt you?’
‘Only here.’ She touched her chest, her hand spread wide. ‘Not . . .’ Her hand flickered over her face. ‘He didn’t do this.’
‘How did . . . ?’
‘Cigarette lighter. I don’t know why. He walked out of here and I felt so fucking angry. See, I go too far and I know right away when I have and then it’s just . . .’ She closed her eyes; put her head back on the couch. ‘It’s embarrassing.’
‘Katie? I wonder . . . Have you considered seeing a doctor? About this, hurting yourself?’
She smiled sadly. ‘Yeah, yeah, I am. Don’t worry.’
The front door opened and Adam walked in. His clothes and face were covered in grey powder.
Smoke in the Room Page 9
