Smoke in the Room

by Emily Maguire

  ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘The kind of things that would make you pity me. Like you’d want to follow up by saying, Oh, honey-pie, you can still live a satisfying and fruitful life.’ Her accent was obnoxiously American. ‘You wouldn’t get it and I don’t want you to. I just want us to have fun together. You need fun, Adam, for real.’ Her skin had a yellow tint, except under her eyes where it was dark amber. The three burn scars were, in mocking contrast, a glowing, healthy pink.

  ‘You look so tired. Do you think you can sleep now?’

  ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead,’ she said and, just like that, she was up and moving towards the door. ‘I’m going to have a shower. Get dressed. I want to take you somewhere different.’

  While she was in the bathroom, Adam put on some clothes and went to Graeme’s room. He was sitting up in bed, his briefcase open across his knees. Adam stood in the doorway so he could hear when the shower stopped running.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I went off before. It’s just kind of weird.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Well, yeah, she’s much younger than you for a start.’

  ‘She’s quite a bit younger than you, too.’

  ‘Not young enough to be my daughter.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Graeme said. ‘But I’m not sleeping with her and I don’t want to, either, in case you were wondering. I don’t see the problem.’

  ‘That’s it, sort of. If you were sleeping with her it would be creepy, right, but understandable. But as it is . . . I mean, I think you’re a nice guy and you seem smart, well-travelled. And she’s . . .’

  ‘What?’

  Adam didn’t know how to say it without sounding nasty. Katie talked all the way through the evening news, because – Adam suspected – she didn’t understand most of what was said. She read Famous magazine but not the newspaper. She hardly showered and seemed to think that resting your clothes on the floor for a couple of days was as good as washing them. She was comfortable climbing into bins and eating whatever decaying crap she pulled out even though she had never heard of freeganism or the Wasteless Society Movement.

  ‘She’s young,’ he said finally.

  ‘Yeah,’ Graeme said. ‘We covered that already.’

  Adam crossed his arms. ‘I don’t understand what’s in it for you.’

  Graeme closed his briefcase. ‘In what?’

  ‘This . . . this . . . whatever it is with her. What are you getting out of it?’

  ‘Out of the friendship? Is that the word you’re looking for?’ He put his briefcase on the floor, swinging his legs out after it. ‘If you tried talking to her instead of just, well, doing what it is that you do, then you’d find the answer to your question.’

  ‘I’ve talked to her plenty. That’s my point. She’s not exactly the world’s most erudite –’

  ‘Erudite!’ Graeme stood up and waved his hand at Adam. ‘Listen, mate, if you’ve spent time talking to her and still don’t get why someone would want her as a friend, then she isn’t the one with the problem.’

  The shower had stopped running. The sound of Katie’s Courtney Love impersonation echoed down the hallway. Adam turned and walked out, closing the door behind him.

  20.

  The bus was crammed with teenagers in beach gear and tourists with burnt noses and clumsily-folded maps. Adam and Katie stood near the back, swaying into each other with every turn. There was not enough air and too much sound. It was not even 9 am and already Adam was tired of the day.

  ‘Our stop,’ Katie said at last, jostling him towards the door and out into the fresher hot air of the street.

  Adam scanned the shopfronts: greengrocer, sushi, juice bar. ‘I need coffee.’

  ‘Not here. Come on.’ Katie led him down the street to a schoolyard dotted with market stalls. They weaved through clusters of bony girls in face-swamping sunglasses and squeezed past prams so large that the hipsters pushing them could easily have snuggled up beside their babies for a nap.

  ‘Paddington Markets,’ Katie said. ‘La-di-da as hell, but heaps of free food if you don’t mind mixing and matching.’

  Within ten minutes they’d assembled breakfast: shots of thick black coffee, a dish of Greek yoghurt, a handful of macadamias and another of raisins, a slice of Turkish bread, a chunk of cheese and a morsel of Moroccan-spiced lamb. After they’d eaten, Adam bought beers with his illegally earned dollars and they drank them sitting on a park bench, watching the weird and beautiful parade down Oxford Street.

  ‘Okay, so that woman there – the one with the orange skin – she was on this reality show, Bondi to Bourke, and all these la-la posh chicks had to survive in the bush and she was this total – Oh, wait, that bloke in the black hat – you recognise him? From that movie, you know? The one with Nicole Kidman. And that girl with the backless dress is the girlfriend of the singer from Tradge, this awful emo band but the singer is gorgeous and so all the fans hate her which is so unfair, because I think she must be a really, really kind and patient person to be with someone so angsty.’

  Through the crowd of fake-tans and giant sunglasses Adam spotted an elderly man with no legs propped up in a trolley. Not just no legs, no body from the waist down. He was a head and torso with arms, but he looked happy talking with the woman pushing him along. As the trolley passed, Adam saw the Veterans’ Association sticker on the back of it. A war injury, then, which meant the man might have lived like that for years. Adam thought that when it happened, the man would have been younger than he was now. He would have been fit and strong, tough as nails. But then he would have woken up one day in some overcrowded, understaffed field hospital, the sounds of screams in his ears, and he would have taken a breath of fetid air and praised God he was still alive. They would have told him he was only half a man, and he would have wished they had let him die. He would have thought first of his farm back home, how it would have to be sold, then wondered how a man could live with the shame of being taken care of every minute. He would have thought of his sweetheart, waiting for him to return and marry her. She wouldn’t want him now, and he would always regret that he did not push harder for her to let him have his way with her before he left.

  Katie chatted on beside him as the afternoon sweltered by. He had never seen her in such direct, startling light; her spiky hair was fairer than he’d thought, more milk chocolate than black, and the skin covering her skull was almost translucent. A royal blue vein pulsed delicately over her left ear. Her freshly shaved legs were speckled pink and her chest and neck were flushed from the heat and beer. He felt his own skin burning and thought about moving to a shadier spot, but couldn’t summon the will to speak, let alone move.

  Katie pointed out a former starlet and her tennis player husband and then a reality TV contestant who had posed for Playboy. She passed cheerful judgment on almost everyone who walked by – that dress was the most beautiful she’d ever seen, those shoes were incredible, that man’s hair was an amazing colour, that baby had such gorgeous brown eyes. Adam wished the war vet would come back. He wondered whether the woman pushing him was his wife, what she had given up for him.

  It was Adam’s night off and Katie had a pocket full of fresh government-issued cash, so they decided to walk home, stopping at every pub on the way. At William Street, Katie persuaded Adam to go into a gay bar and although they were underdressed and already half-drunk it was early enough that the bouncer let them in. An Italian guy who insisted he was slurring at four in the afternoon because he was still on Roma time bought them sour-apple cocktails and a packet of cigarettes. ‘Please excuse,’ he said to Katie and pulled Adam onto the empty dance floor.

  Nineties house music thudded. The guy danced Adam into an unlit corner and kissed him hard. There was a numbing familiarity to it all: the rasp of stubble against stubble, the rough hands on his stomach, the hard-on pressed against his hip. In the dark, the guy revealed himself to be less drunk and less Italian than he’d let on. He opened his pants and in f
ast, Aussie-accented English, begged Adam to bring him off.

  This was like the old days, too: the sense of power and obligation that came with wanting nothing from a desperate man. Keeping an eye on the distant figure at the bar, Adam gripped the offered cock in his right hand and pumped fast. The man moaned and dug his fingers into the flesh above Adam’s hips. After a minute, the man said, ‘Lift your shirt. Quick.’ Adam jerked away and the guy dropped to his knees, juddering into his own hands.

  Adam bolted for the door yelling for Katie to follow.

  ‘What? What happened?’

  ‘In a sec. Come on.’ He ran as fast as he could, feeling the concrete through the soles of his shoes, the shock of impact up through his spine, the slap of air in his face. He stopped to allow Katie to catch up, grabbed her hand and forced her to keep his pace. His legs felt obscenely strong. People grunted or swore as he knocked against and past them, and this made him run faster. He felt infected by the guy in the bar and by the arms and shoulders and swinging handbags of the people walking so slowly and mindlessly along Oxford Street. The dying heat of the day, the stickiness of Katie’s hand, the yoghurt and cheese and cocktails churning in his stomach, the picture of a legless, helpless, breathing Eugenie made him feel woozy and unhinged.

  ‘Adam, stop!’ Katie yanked his arm hard and he fell against a wall, rolled across its surface and stopped, gasping in an alleyway with a derelict warehouse at the end and faded newspapers, split garbage bags and what may have once been a cat lining its sides.

  ‘My lungs are gonna explode. What’s wrong? Why are we running?’

  Adam felt the tightness in his chest and thighs, but still he could have run all the way home. ‘I jerked him off,’ he said.

  Katie pushed him with an open palm. ‘You dirty slut! Are you turning queer again? For real? How was it?’

  Adam had an erection the size of the Centrepoint Tower. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said, opening his jeans with one hand and urging Katie to the ground with the other. He yanked down her shorts and underpants and opened her with his fingers. She was dry and tight, but she said it was okay and hooked her legs around his hips as he pushed inside her. He thought about the Italian guy pumping into his fist, and then his own cock rolling between Eugenie’s hands, and then the way she would whimper when he bit her nipples, the way her face looked in the seconds after they first made love. He found that the look in Katie’s upturned eyes – serious and focused and calmly confident, like she was performing open-heart surgery – made everything else fade. It didn’t matter to her that his desire was, and would only ever be, for a dead woman. He held her gaze and came hard. The sinking sun gave even the filthy Kings Cross bricks a pinkish glow.

  In Victoria Park by the old Gothic university they lay beneath an ancient Moreton Bay fig tree which seemed to bristle with anger, shaking its branches, shooting soft bullets at their heads.

  ‘What the hell? There’s not even a breeze tonight.’

  ‘It’s only bats,’ said Katie, flicking a pellet of crap off Adam’s shoulder.

  ‘You serious?’ He looked up and heard the twittering, then saw the hundreds of waxy wings. ‘Why are there bats?’

  ‘They live in most of the parks around here.’ Katie continued brushing his shoulder even though there was nothing there. ‘You must’ve seen them before. Don’t you ever look up?’

  ‘I guess I mustn’t. Are we safe here?’

  ‘Yeah. They’re harmless unless you, like, try to catch one or something. Then they’re all bitey-scratchy, like angry kittens.’

  ‘This is the strangest city. No one here seems to know that.’

  ‘Because it isn’t strange to us. It’s just where we are.’

  Adam sank his fingers into the grass. It was so soft it was like grass in a dream. During the weeks he spent in the hotel he’d heard about the drought at least nine times a day. Nobody seemed to have told the groundskeeper here about it, though. This was probably the nicest grass Adam had ever seen and touched in his life. He wondered if it had something to do with the nutrients in the bat droppings. He looked up at the branches overhead and was caught by the stripes of pink and gold peeping through.

  ‘Check out at that sky, will you. It’s so beautiful.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Katie said. ‘It’s actually the most awful thing. Everybody says it’s beautiful so they don’t have to really look at it or think about it. Because if you do, if you think about it, god, it’s petrifying.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘That we’re specks. Specks on an unimaginably large, fatally hot rock hurtling through space at terrifying speed. I remember learning that when I was in primary school and I’ve never forgotten it. I can’t believe they tell it to little kids. What we see when we look at the night sky is dead light and deadly space. It’s the most awful thing in the world. I hate it.’

  Adam thought of Katie’s always-open, bloodshot eyes and felt the space open up inside him. He took her face in his hands and rolled her head towards him. ‘So stop looking at it. Look at me.’

  ‘Where do you think we go, Adam? After, I mean?’

  ‘I used to think heaven, until I found out there were a hundred versions of that to choose from and any one of them could be the right one, or none of them maybe. And then I met Eugenie and she had this amazing faith. She talked about heaven like it was a place she’d actually been. Conviction like that, especially coming from someone you . . . it’s contagious. I started to believe, too.’

  ‘But you don’t anymore?’

  ‘I don’t know. At the time, my mom thought I was faking it, said it was too perfect. Like something out of a Christian romance novel, you know? Love converting the sinner into a cookie-cutter godly husband, but . . . it felt real. I felt God in her, in us.’

  ‘And now there’s no her, there’s no God?’

  ‘The only time I’ve ever seriously wanted to kill someone was after her funeral, when this ring-in of a minister said that my grief showed a lack of faith. He said Eugenie was in a better place and it was selfish of those of us left behind to begrudge her that.’

  ‘How do you know it isn’t true?’

  ‘It might be. I hope it is. But I can’t believe it. Her death was not peaceful or happy. It was brutal. If that was some last trial before bliss . . . I wish that was true.’

  Katie inched her face closer and touched his nose with hers. ‘I wish we could know for sure. I don’t believe in heaven or any of that Sunday school crap, but when I think that it’s just nothing . . . It can’t just be nothing, can it?’

  ‘You could never be nothing.’

  ‘I don’t mean that.’

  ‘I don’t mean that, either. Genie, me, Napoleon, Cobain, Hitler, whoever – we can’t unexist. We can’t just not be real because this pissy little pump –’ he placed his palm over her heart ‘– stops beating. There’s this question Buddhists ask: when does a seed become a sapling and a sapling a tree? You know, when did baby Katherine become little kid Katherine and when did she become this Katie, here, now? That baby girl was you but you’re not her. That’s how I think death is. It’s just another transition. I think Eugenie exists but her form is different. I don’t mean she’s a spirit or anything, just that her energy isn’t gone from the world – it’s dispersed, spread around.’

  ‘Dude, you are such a hippy.’

  ‘Yeah, well, there was never much chance I’d be anything else.’

  Later, sleepless, Katie took Adam’s wallet from the drawer beside her bed. She carried it to the living room and slid out the photo of Eugenie she knew he kept hidden behind his Californian driver’s licence. The woman in the picture had pale hair and brown shoulders and a gappy smile. Katie knew, looking at the photo with its ragged, finger-smudged edges, that Adam was full of shit. He was also full of kindness. He must know, every time he looked at this photo, that dispersed energy is the same as nothing. It has no mouth to kiss, no wind-tangled hair to smooth or eyes to see the smile you make just for h
er. Energy can’t feel soft grass and night breezes or hear bats and stories about Buddhists and seeds and trees.

  21.

  Jaswinda had done what Jenny and the others had been urging her to, and put in for four weeks’ compassionate leave. A major donor had written to express regret that ‘due to internal operational considerations’ it could no longer contribute to the Foundation’s work. Just before six, news came through that a Chinese dissident who was deported after his asylum claim was refused had been taken into custody as he disembarked from his plane.

  ‘I don’t know why we bother,’ said Sherry, who had worked on the legal appeal.

  ‘Masochism?’ said Jaswinda.

  Mike slung an arm over Sherry’s shoulder. ‘Nah, masochists actually enjoy getting belted up. We’re just pathetic time-wasting losers, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Hey,’ Graeme said. ‘We can’t win them all. Besides, we don’t do it to win. We do it because it’s worth doing. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Sherry. Jaswinda and Mike exchanged glances. ‘So what do you reckon, gang – happy hour at Swinson’s or proper cocktails at the Roto Room?’

  ‘Both,’ said Mike. ‘You in, Jas?’

  ‘God, yes. Let’s go.’

  For a moment, Graeme considered joining them. He imagined sitting at a low pub table, sipping some red wine and . . . And what? They wouldn’t want to talk about work. What else was there he could discuss? He couldn’t tell them about the project that had consumed his spare time for the past few months: reading through eight shoe-boxes full of scribbled notebooks representing thirty years in the field, copying out the useful information to be typed up, indexed and cross-referenced, then destroying the original books with their juvenile poetry, boastful notes on women he’d slept with and the names and addresses of dealers and brothels. And he certainly couldn’t talk to his colleagues about the warm, wriggly girl who slid into his bed at night and hypnotised him with her looping, leaping narratives.