Dark Roots

by Cate Kennedy

  So I am left alone with you again, out of visiting hours, three days until our deadline, as you slumber in this cave, this room that is an everywhere. What did we do, till we loved, Beth, and what will we do now? Maybe when I was nineteen I would have believed that if the power of speech could be mustered with such effort, it could be squandered on declarations of love, but I know you, and so I know better now.

  Take out this tube is what you said to me. Take out this tube.

  How is it that I can want to sleep, as I walk through my kitchen at 2.00 a.m? Here is the wreckage of preparation, of dishes piled and unwashed, of a red light flashing on an answering machine like an abandoned satellite signalling for re-entry somewhere, anywhere. Here are debts in unopened envelopes, the slow drifting swansong of resignation. And here is a plane and a set of drill bits, a piece of timber leaning against the back door, a small pile of wood shavings I scoop into my hand before stepping carefully over that dark gap and sitting down.

  I raise them to my face and inhale as I sit there, smelling forest which is gone now, a breathing tree turned mute and felled and unrecognisable, nothing but lumber.

  A Pitch Too High for the Human Ear

  If I signed off at 4.50 I could take the 5.00 p.m. bus and be home in time to help Matthew with his maths and peel the potatoes while Vicki moved around the kitchen doing everything else. We’d turn the TV round on its console, like one of those things in a Chinese restaurant, and watch the six o’clock news together, hardly ever commenting on it. Baths and a story. Another beer at 9.00 and I’d already be thinking of tomorrow. It was that kind of tiredness you get from doing nothing all day, the exhaustion of sitting. When I married I was a fairly handy forward with the Cougars — B Grade, scored 174 baskets one season. Now I drove my kids to sports, stood on windy sidelines hearing parents scream at their eight-year-olds to get in and kill him. Sometimes I’d still be awake at 3.00 a.m. or so, usually Sunday nights, lying there unstretched, cramped up and watching the smooth outline of my wife dreaming something else nearby.

  This is how you slide from a bed: move your foot out and over the edge, find the floor, slide sideways supporting yourself on the bedside table, your fingers touching the fake antique lamp your parents gave you a pair of for a wedding present. Haul out from under the doona. Carry your runners and put them on outside the back door, with your dog already leaping at the thought of what’s ahead, way down at the gate. You can just see, in the moonlight, that strange red-gold glint, like road reflectors, from the dog’s eyes. Ecstatic to be out, to be marauding, to be running.

  When I was in training, before I was married, I used to run four or five kilometres a night sometimes, around the deserted cul-de-sacs in the suburbs when they were so new there were no streetlights. I’d learned to drive in the same streets, reverse parking down battleaxe driveways of barely finished houses, doing hill starts up in the high parts of the new residential zone. Look out beyond the landscaping of roads then, and there were paddocks full of agisted horses. Now the shrubs were higher than your head, there were cars in every drive, ten buses a day, a new health centre. Five kilometres then, with a sense I could have kept going out past the cleared blocks and sewer trenches and run straight into the hills. Now I was flagging after three, barely making it to the service station on the corner of the expressway, looking at the yellow neon of the 24-hour drive-through McDonalds where the horses used to be. Fourteen years — what’s that? Two kids, a wedding photo where you can’t believe the suit you wore, and the golden arches.

  We’d got Kelly when he was two years old from a workmate who said he needed a lot of exercise, whose relief I could feel as he brushed dog hair off his car’s upholstery and declined a beer.

  He was a sucker for the dead-of-night runs, Kelly. Heeler-cross, and I never saw him tire. On Sunday nights when Disneyland was on, Kelly would be pressing himself to the back door, staring inside with such longing that Louise and Matthew would beg Vicki until she’d relent, and they’d slide open the glass door and Kelly would be allowed to come in, so abject and grateful he’d be practically crawling, licking our hands, cramming himself between the kids, and Vicki saying, Look just leave him alone and he’ll calm down, kids, just relax and stop mucking round with him, but finally something would be overturned and Kelly would be outside again, and it would be, Okay now, time for bed, school tomorrow, the dog staring in through the glass with desperate remorse. You could hear him, sometimes, this barely audible high whine, still as a statue, only a muscle in his throat giving him away.

  Half past three in the morning, though, and Kelly was beautiful to watch, down across the footy oval and up the hill, turning around to recover the ground back to me, a long shape in the moonlight. He’d streak past me, and out of the darkness I’d feel him nudge my hand in passing as he came forward again; he could have gone all night, barrelling into the sleeping suburbs. I’d pound up those streets with my chest hurting, my feet feeling like sinkers, knowing I’d never score 174 again. Catching my breath at the servo, Kelly would go round behind the 7–11 and root through the weekend garbage, and nobody was there to give a shit.

  Here’s how you get into a bed without waking the other person: flush the toilet and come back in as if you’re practically sleepwalking, fold back the sheet so that it doesn’t disturb them, slowly straighten out your legs under it, and watch the red digital numbers change from 5.15 to 5.16, to 5.17. They’re so silent they’re eerie, digital clocks — it’s as if time is not passing after all, just kind of rolling.

  Why don’t we talk more, after the kids are in bed? is what Vicki used to say. Then it became why don’t you talk more, then oh, Andrew, he never talks. Don’t bother, Vicki would say at the barbecues we went to, to other women drinking wine on the folding chairs. I married a non-talker.

  When she stopped talking, though, when she got so jack of it she closed up and just worked silently in the kitchen like a black cloud, I could hardly stand it. I would rather have her filling in the blank spots, even complaining, even shouting, than silent. Spreading butter on bread, on the eighteen rows of sandwiches she was going to put in the freezer so that you’d know for a week it was going to be devon and tomato sauce, then cheese and ham, things that froze well, so careful with placing the squares against the crust of the bread, saying, Andrew this is just crazy, I’m going to have to do a night course or something to get out of the house. Tucking the corners back on the sandwich bags, wiping the back of her hand against her eyes like she thought the kids wouldn’t notice. Watching her, a hundred things came into my mind to say that I discarded, everything staying unsaid — like when Matt was born and we just sat there looking at each other. The difference was then it didn’t seem to matter, me being something that she used to call inarticulate and she now called withholding.

  Ham and cheese, ham and cheese, ham and cheese, seed mustard on Dad’s, chutney on the kids’. I couldn’t take my eyes from her hands, remembered them squeezing mine on our wedding day as I’d stood up to make my speech, the culmination of four days of nervous diarrhoea. I married a non-talker, Vicki saying with a tight smile at parties, or silently flicking through the channels with the remote as I wracked my brain for something to say that would make her talk again. How can you just stand there? Vicki said now, sawing the sandwiches with the knife. I don’t know, I answered, which was the honest truth.

  Twelve years of night running, working the bolt open silently on the back gate, watching Kelly let rip.

  When we started the oval had opened out to empty land, now there was a maze of clothes lines, fences, paved patios. When the dog disappeared up the incline on the other side, he’d pause and turn, waiting for me. I could whistle so softly it was barely audible and he’d instantly race back like a rocket. Incredible hearing, turning towards the sound like a dish picking up radar. Outside the back door, ears straining through the glass, he’d hear his name and start shaking with excitement, picki
ng up his front feet like they were hot, trying to sit up straight like a kid waiting to be let out of school. Oh please, Mum, Louise would plead. Please let him. My soft-hearted Lou.

  I got promoted. Matthew got taller and sat hunched over his Nintendo GameBoy instead of practising soccer. Vicki did two nights a week at TAFE: Write Your Life Story, Crystal Healing, Thai Cooking, Start Your Own Small Business, The Tarot and You, Stretch Sewing.

  One year I was opening and unfolding the Christmas tree and remembered that I’d meant to fix the two broken branches with fishing line a few months before. No — it had been a year ago. It couldn’t be a year since Christmas but it was; the same jammed aisles of $2 crap, worrying what Vicki would like, thirty-six shopping hours to go, going crazy with the muzak. If you’d have asked me what I’d wanted, I couldn’t have said.

  It had been different — I was sure it had been — when the kids believed in Santa. Vicki and I had drunk port together and eaten the shortbread, scattered the grass clippings Louise had arranged in little piles for the reindeer, listened to the carols on TV, gone into the bedrooms and looked at our kids sleeping, feeling sentimental and exhausted from setting up train sets and fairy outfits in the lounge room. Kids believe in Santa; adults believe in childhood.

  Then it was January the second of a New Year we didn’t stay up for, and I was back to work on the twelfth, and in that time would be a week at the coast, and in the middle of the night I’m watching the digital numbers shift like blinking and I get up and get my runners. Kelly’s curled up on the back mat, and wakes up from a deep sleep when I touch him and looks surprised. He stands and stretches, runs a bit stiffly down to the gate to wait, and it seems like the same kind of strange joke that only such a short time ago you couldn’t keep him down; he leapt from that guy’s car into our front yard with so much energy. Now he takes off down the street and I stop at the end to rest a stitch that feels like a deep knot in my gut pulling upwards, and I jog to the oval and see Kelly trotting slowly to the incline on the far side. I am forty-two years old and the kind of guy who once scored 174 baskets in a season but now gives his wife a StaySharp knife for Christmas, who can barely jog two kilometres, who can never think of what to say, and none of it really hits me until I whistle to watch Kelly bolting back down across the grass and he doesn’t come. He is turned towards me and seems to be waiting, he seems to pick me out in the darkness and know what has always happened before, but he shakes his head, gives a nervous yawn and I realise he can’t hear me; he’s deaf.

  It seems a little extreme, the vet said to me. Lots of dogs with impaired hearing continue to enjoy a good quality of life. Kelly lying there, looking at nothing. Not impaired, silent. I watched the vet click his fingers behind the dog, clap, whistle. Sometimes, he said, this kind of thing’s hereditary. He got out a kind of tuning fork and struck it against his desk and tried again. This is at a pitch too high for the human ear, he said, telling me about frequency range and how maybe it was only partial, how I’d have to watch out now for traffic and keep him on a leash, how often heelers live to a ripe old age, and Kelly, deaf, stiff and fifteen years old — it suddenly struck me like a train — didn’t stir once. But you’re going to have to start thinking soon … said the vet, and I interrupted him.

  Do it now, I said.

  Driving home, it felt like something was strangling me, a muscle tight as a wire in my throat, giving me away, a sound escaping like one long word. The only word.

  God, how could you? How could you? Vicki kept saying, rocking Louise on the couch. I couldn’t open my mouth, for fear of what might come out. The compression of unsaid things filling my chest, lungs hurting for air. Don’t you have any feelings at all, she said. It was Matthew that had the nightmares after that, in the week we didn’t go to the coast. We both jumped to get up to him, both grimly solicitous, comforting, heating milk, suddenly keen to outdo each other as the better parent, as if we both knew what was ahead. Passing each other in the hall we might as well have been two strangers on the bus, standing to let the other pass with a brittle courtesy that made me know it was finally over.

  He had the kids’ dog put down, Vicki would say at barbecues now, without even telling them. The family dog. Andrew just had so many unresolved issues.

  This would be later, after Vicki had counselling.

  Wednesday afternoons I work through till 6.00 and drive out to the stadium for the match. The Westside Wranglers, middle of the ladder, and none of us tries too hard. Every guy in the team is my age, sick of jogging, nursing some minor nagging injury that requires liniment and strapping, and only three of us are still married. Sunday afternoons we train half-heartedly with lots of familiar banter and then on the weekends I don’t have custody of the kids I drink stubbies with them in the social club while we watch the A-grade women’s teams on the courts below us. The sounds seem to distort, hitting the high hangar ceiling — the whistles and shouts and squeaks of people’s shoes as they pound up and down — sound bending like it’s coming through water.

  I watch people sometimes, wonder how they can walk around with the weight of what they know. Wonder if they feel like me, stumbling with lead shoes on the bottom of the ocean, swimming in a sea of the unsayable. It’s a mistake we make, thinking it’s words that tell us everything. It’s sound that breaks glasses, cracks windows, sends cats up trees. Bats hear more than humans, understand more noise, let alone dogs. Maybe we’re just not getting it, standing here listening for sensible speech, dying of loneliness and waiting for whatever it is. How do we know we’re not calling and calling all the time, our throats so tight with it, it’s too high to hear? At night I hear dogs barking, and think how much of their howling is outside my conscious range, so that I feel it like a vibration but mistake it for silence? Sitting in the club, turning my fourth and last stubbie on the laminex, I want to phone my ex-wife. I want to say her name and then hold the receiver into air, let her listen to the roar of everything we can’t bear to hear.

  Can you hear it Vicki? I want to say. It’s not words, it’s nothing so coherent as words. It’s all of us, hoarse with calling, straining in the darkness to hear something we recognise as our names.

  Habit

  I’ve never been much good at reading the fine print on cards, least of all after a 28-hour flight. But now that I was actually carrying three kilos of cocaine, I read the customs declaration form with, you might say, a whole new vested interest. Any illegal or contraband goods? Well, you’d have to be pretty jetlagged to fall into that trap, wouldn’t you? Tick no. Any weaponry? Any exotic flora or fauna? They must think we’re idiots, says the person next to me, an insufferable bore in black leather pants which have squeaked ever since we left Singapore.

  Well, no, they don’t think we’re idiots. It’s the only way of nailing us if we’re carrying anything, otherwise we can plead ignorance of the law. I don’t tell him this, of course. It would be an open provocation to continue talking to me, and the last thing I want is another instalment of his failed marriage. I seem to be inviting confession and disclosure — people have been doing it to me since boarding the first plane in Bogotá. My silence only seems to encourage them.

  I am steeling myself also for the three questions, the three biggies they hit you with as your suitcase hits the examination table. Is this your luggage? Did you pack it yourself? Are you aware of its contents? Then they pull open the zip and all bets are off — you’re cactus. Foolish carriers, in these intolerably stressful circumstances, take a couple of tranks to settle their nerves for this ordeal. Personally I can’t think of anything that would give me away more than pinhole pupils and a Mogadon stupor.

  I suppose I should say a few words about the cocaine. An illegal drug, certainly, but a word in my defence, your Honour. I have, I suppose, a habit. If you can call three snorts a habit, because they instilled in me a craving for the drug that surpassed mere physical hankering. Three years ago I tried so
me street coke and the hit was just enough, through the glucodin and speed percentage that seared into my nasal cavities, to make me make a vow to myself. I decided that if I ever had the chance, I would try the real thing: the purest, whitest Colombian cocaine available to the casual buyer.

  As I said, that was a few years ago now, at a party where most people were on the nod around the room with alcohol and dope. With narcotic drugs, in fact. Ridiculously, cocaine is also classified as a narcotic drug, and that evening illustrated for me that misnomer, the vast gulf between its effects and those of alcohol. Me and a few friends mashed the grass down in the backyard with our dancing. I went straight from the party to work and put in a good day. When I got home and pondered on my energy, rapier-like memory retention and sparkling intellect, I made the decision that if one day I had nothing to lose, I’d make the trip myself and take the risk, and buy enough coke to last me the distance.

  And it’s not long to go now, that distance. I have a trusted doctor, Dr Mick I-won’t-tell-you-his-last-name, who’ll keep me out of jail, if it comes to that, on humanitarian grounds: he’ll show the court the X-rays, the images of the shadow and its advance, and the judge’s heart will be wrung with sympathy. At least that’s what I’m banking on. A year, eighteen months, whatever it is, I want to spend it full of energy and memory and sparkle, not dry-retching into a bucket after pointless chemotherapy.

  So here I am on the plane, inviting intimate disclosures from the squeaker, my pen toying over the box that will seal my fate. Have you anything to declare? Well, yes, as a matter of fact I have. I declare that if I get out of this airport intact, undiscovered, I will put one bag of cocaine aside and savour the rest slowly, sit up at night feeling awake and powerful and not sick; and write letters to everyone I need to, to be opened at the party at which my will will be read out. My will, for what it’s worth. My spotless record as a youth worker has left me with no assets besides a VCR so ancient that no one can repair it and that no one in their right mind would steal, a flat full of furniture that may as well go straight back down to the St Vinnies and a collection of books that friends will find are mostly theirs anyway. Not even a car. I sold the car, to pay for the airline ticket to South America. So sue me. And for the cocaine, I cashed in my super. Hell, you may as well spend it while you’ve got it — you can’t take it with you. No indeed.