by Luke Davies
Somehow it was midday. We had to defrost that fucking chicken. I had a manic burst with the axe out at the woodpile and got the stove going at last, but hot water was still a long way off. I filled the kitchen sink with cold water and dropped the chicken in. I put on the electric jug and added some hot water and the ice began to fall away. As I ripped the plastic off the chicken I noticed the use-by date: Friday, two days earlier.
“Ah, fuck!”
I called out to Candy. She came into the kitchen.
“Does this smell bad to you?”
She leaned over the sink and sniffed. “It doesn’t smell so good.”
“Shit, Candy, what are we going to do?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll just baste it in lots of stuff. I don’t know, basil, honey, bay leaves. What’s in the cupboard? We’ll go through the cupboard. What do you put on a roast?”
Her parents arrived at about one o’clock. We kept them in the lounge room and made small talk for twenty minutes, but finally Candy’s mother couldn’t help herself. It was inspection time.
“Now, what can I do in the kitchen?” She was already out of her seat and heading toward the door.
“Nothing, Mum. Really, it’s fine.”
“Nonsense,” her mother replied, through the door now. “There must be something I can do.”
“Everything’s under control,” Candy said as she followed her down the hall.
“We’re just waiting for the oven to heat up,” I offered meekly, my voice trailing away.
Now it was just me and Candy’s father alone in the lounge room. I turned to him and winced.
“We’re running a bit behind.”
He smiled politely and took a sip of his beer. “No worries, mate.”
I went into the kitchen. You could see Candy’s mother turning tight-lipped and pissed off. One minute they were niggling at each other about “you go to all this trouble to invite us up here and you can’t even manage the simple decency of getting the meal together on time” and “get off my case, Mum” and “it’s not the food that’s even the issue here, it’s your attitude.” And the next minute the thing just began to spiral.
I stood in the corner of the kitchen and said, “Okay, let’s just calm down. We’ll be eating in less than an hour. Why don’t I open one of these bottles of wine you’ve brought along?”
But the thing had gone too far for that. Candy’s mother turned on me, a thing she’d rarely done over the years, despite her obvious dislike.
“That chicken is rock solid!” she exclaimed. “We’re not going to be eating until the sun goes down!”
Candy’s father was in the doorway now. “Hey, hey, hey,” he said, patting the air with his hands, “let’s all calm down a moment.”
“Oh, she infuriates me,” Candy’s mother said, her back stiffening and her eyes glazing with the same cold anger that came over her during fights about money. “You really need to get ahold of yourself, young lady. It’s about time you got your life together. The little details and the big.”
She reminded me of a pit bull terrier. She was an imposing woman at the softest of times. I wanted to defend her daughter from her meanness.
I looked over to Candy. She was standing beside the stove, her shoulders hunched forward, her fists clenched, her face contorted with pain, tears flooding from her eyes. It gave me a shock. It seemed a profound change had descended. Maybe this was one of the vultures, and its shadow alone was enough to fuck your head, and it had come down on Candy, not me. Her corner of the kitchen seemed dark and different.
“Look at me!” she screamed, in a voice that was hard to recognize as hers. “Can’t you see? Don’t you understand? I’ve been clenching my fucking fists since I was thirteen years old! Look at my fists! Look at my fucking fists!” She held them up toward her mother as she sobbed and screamed. They were like two little arthritic balls of hooked bone and tight skin. They really did look like they’d been closed for years. “Look at them! Look at them, will you! I haven’t been able to unclench my fists since I was thirteen years old! Don’t you understand? You fucking bitch, don’t you understand?”
I was scared shitless. It was a powerful thing happening, a sudden outbreak of a truth deeper than what I had known about Candy. And these were the kind of truths they locked you up for. On one level it was incoherent, and yet on another there was something about those locked fists that was clear and terrifying. I didn’t know what it was, but I suddenly understood why heroin must have seemed so good to Candy.
She went on and on while the three of us stood there. It was like there were sparks coming off her. I moved toward her, to put my arm around her, to slow her down, but her body tensed like a wild animal. I retreated a step.
“Baby doll, it’s okay,” I said.
Her shoulders sagged and her sobbing began to increase. “I can’t unclench my hands. I just can’t unclench my hands. I can’t relax,” she blubbered.
“Candace, darling, you’re overwrought,” her mother said, relenting a little. “It’s been a big move, it’s been a big year, there’s been a lot of change, adjusting to the country life. You need to take things easy.”
I moved to Candy again and this time put my arms around her frail shoulders.
“Just go,” she said. “Fuck off. Forget the lunch.” Then she buried her head in my chest and started crying more. “Tell them to forget the lunch. Tell them to just forget about lunch. Tell them to go.”
I looked over to Candy’s parents. They were pretty stunned and awkward. Obviously it was easier, clearer, more concrete, when we just hassled them for money and they could tell us we were fucked.
“I’m sorry,” I said over Candy’s shoulder, trying to act like not too much was wrong. “Why don’t we make it another day? It’s just a bad day. I’m sorry.”
It was a bad day, a kind of marker day, from which things could deteriorate more rapidly. Her parents packed Sparky and Spanky into the station wagon and began the hungry drive back to Melbourne. Candy and I walked outside to the windbreak that ran along the ridge where the fields sloped away. We sat underneath one of the huge old pines. Candy cried for a long time. I took her hands one at a time in mine, flattening them and stroking her open palms.
“Do you know why you’re crying, Candy?”
“I’m scared,” she said.
“It’s all right,” I said, and as the words came out I realized all the times I’d said them before.
She looked up at me with her flooded blue eyes. Her lips curled and quivered in sorrow. “I think we’re going to end.”
I frowned. “We’ll never end.”
“We’ll end. That’s what I hate. We’ll have to end.”
“We’ll never end.”
Her palms were clammy and they trembled faintly as I stroked them. “It won’t work.”
“Candy, it will work.”
“We think it can but it can’t.”
“It’s all different now. We’ve come this far.”
“Look at what we’ve been through. We’re barely getting out alive. We should be happy with that. Happy enough with only that.”
“I love you.”
“Love?” she asked. “I love you too, you know. Look at where love has gotten us.”
“Do you hate me?”
She sighed deeply. “Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I hate you.”
I felt what seemed like indigestion. Then I thought it might be a mild heart attack. My mind was going fast but none of my thoughts made sense as the afternoon began to cool.
After a while of silence Candy said, “I didn’t mean that.”
But I knew our hearts were scarred and might never get better.
Coco appeared from behind the windbreak. Her black flanks bulged with the weight of the kittens inside her. She purred and pressed herself against us. Time seemed to move in lumbering jerks, each thing separate. It was painful to be alive.
“We should feed the cats,” I said at last, and we stood up and wen
t back into the house, into the powerful smell of burned Sunday lunch.
We’d been outside for a long time and forgotten about the roast. Smoke poured from the oven. The chicken was black. The vegetables had caramelized into a gelatinous charcoal. We left them on the counter to cool down before we could throw them out. The trays sat there sizzling. It was the sound malice would make if it could talk. Candy said, “That’s our Sunday lunch. Look at it, it’s a sculpture. Guess what it’s called?”
“What?”
“It’s called, ‘The Afternoon of the Closed Fists.’ By Candy.”
I didn’t say anything.
We found some rolled oats and had porridge for dinner, with lots of sugar. We drank the wine Candy’s parents had brought, and the rest of the beer, and watched TV and went to sleep.
Like I said, that was a bad day, but it was a good day compared to some that came soon after. Heroin had been hard and simple, but as Candy began to lose her mind, this metaphor stuff increased. And with it came anger. It was like the big bang theory. First there was nothing, and then the anger started, and it expanded outward in all directions, and then it was everything.
There were no more soft, sad conversations beneath the pine trees. It seemed from this point on that all we did was fight.
It was rapid and vicious. We didn’t sleep much. The only good thing about this period of time was that it didn’t last long, in real terms, in calendar terms.
We fought about the farm.
It had seemed so easy: money drops from the sky, you buy a farm. Yeah right. I didn’t know about responsibility. I thought I deserved a medal, for getting off smack, for coming down off the methadone. I mean, I was not a danger to society anymore. Your VCR and stereo were safe, from me at least. But what did the world expect? A guy from the shire council knocked on the door one day and told me there were some weeds in one of our fields and they were the kind that had to be removed. It was the law, he said.
Fucking weeds! The field was covered with them. Leave them be, I thought. Who cares? But in the country they cared.
At the end of the first day bent double in the field, tearing the mutant kudzulike things from the soil with my bare hands, I staggered into the kitchen.
“This is bullshit!” I said, wiping the sweat from my brow, my hands bleeding from the thorns. “I hate living in the country. It’s a bloody nightmare.”
“Don’t be a crybaby,” Candy said. “It’s not very becoming.”
“Well, why don’t you get out there and help me?”
“Listen, I just hocked my arse for five years. Pulling a few weeds is not going to hurt you.”
“I just don’t see the point in manual labor. It’s ridiculous.”
“You just don’t see the point. You don’t see it, do you?”
“Ah, cryptic. Very scary. Do you want me to go, then?”
“Yeah, just fuck off out of the house for a while. I can’t stand you being here.”
“If I fuck off, Candy, I’ll fuck off out of your life.”
“Yeah, you can do that too.” She stared at me and her eyes seemed vacant. “Why not? It’s not a bad idea.”
We fought about money.
We had none.
“Then stop drinking so much,” she said.
“We have to drink,” I said, “we’re down to eight mils of methadone. Why do you think everything’s so difficult?”
“If we had some money, things wouldn’t be so difficult.”
“There are no jobs around here, Candy. What do you want me to do?”
“You’re just a jerk,” she said. “I don’t want anything. I don’t know what I want.”
“Why do you keep attacking me, Candy?”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, okay?”
“Listen, how about this? I’ll grow a crop, and that’ll make us some money. I’ll get maybe twenty plants in that gap between the windbreak and the shed. It’s a wedge in there. It’s nice and sunny. A thousand bucks a plant. Maybe ten thousand. I’ll look after you.”
“You do that,” she said, smiling like she didn’t believe me. “You plant those seeds.”
We fought about the unknowable gap between us, in the guise of fighting about clean walls.
One day I woke up and Candy had written in lipstick, in large letters on the bedroom wall, MOTHER=SLUT. SLUT BITCH CUNT. If I felt concern for the meaning of the act, I suppressed it with anger for the act itself.
“What the fuck is that?”
Candy was sitting naked at the dressing table, putting on makeup. “It’s a statement of fact, what do you think?”
“Jesus, Candy! It’s all over the wall. What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m expressing myself,” she said.
“Can’t you express yourself on a drawing pad or something? Who’s going to clean it off? Not me. What’s this with your mother, anyway?”
She swiveled around. “Hey, listen. If not her, then you.”
“Candy, I think you might be losing it. I think you might need to see a doctor.”
“If not her, then you,” she repeated, shouting this time, pointing at me. “Okay, then. You.”
She stood up and walked to a fresh patch of wall.
“Let’s see now.”
I watched the lipstick in her hand. It swung up and touched the white surface of the wall. I could see a small red mark where contact had been made. She looked over her shoulder at me, then looked back at the wall. Her hand moved downward, an oblique stroke from left to right. There was a lovely soft texture to the unrolling of the redness, and for a moment I could see how it would be fun to write on walls with lipstick. W. The first letter was W.
WEAK.
WEAK SLIME LOSER COCK FERRET. Somehow it was the ferret that hurt the most.
“I hope you’re having fun there,” I said, knowing it was a pathetic thing to say. But I felt a strange surge of power. Even through the pain of coming off narcotics, I was beginning to sense that there might be a me in there somewhere. It was a scattered kind of me, but I wondered if it could gather itself together. I was all those things that Candy was writing, and yet, somehow, I didn’t have to be. There was a me of the future that might be able to make choices. A me that could feel hope, and pain. With every word that Candy wrote, I felt an exhilaration. That she had been right on the afternoon of the closed fists. That we would end, and break the bonds of each other. It was as if I felt a pride about being me, and the words on the wall didn’t match it. Since there wasn’t a great deal to be proud of from my past, I figured it must have been a glimpse of imagined pride about a possible future.
“That’s really smart, Candy. That’s good. I’m glad you think that.”
She dragged her arm back across the wall and underlined the words. She dressed quickly and walked outside. I heard the car start and drive away. The sense of exhilaration passed and I lay in the grit-filled bed with a hollow pain in the pit of my stomach. I stared at all the red words on the wall. After a while I went to the fridge and opened a beer for breakfast. Then I hitchhiked into Korrumburra to get my methadone.
Events like this were making me realize that I hadn’t really felt anything in years. It was hard, this new business of emotions. Five minutes, like that five minutes in bed, was almost too much to bear. Something was growing inside me—an awareness of a way out of things—but it was obvious I could only take it in small doses.
Mostly, though, I still somehow figured it was just a bad patch. Maybe a break was all that was needed. A break, not a breakdown. But I couldn’t sense the scale of the catastrophe that was looming in our tiny lives. My measuring devices were blunt, unsophisticated. My radar was all scrambled. Living through each day seemed such an enormous effort; it was all I could do merely to keep my own balance.
We fought about infidelity.
It was infidelity that was the final trigger, which is not as strange as it sounds. There was prostitution, of course, which didn’t count, and then there was this. But this, this
new thing, interest in another, was about desire or lust; was a king of turning away. It was painful, though in the scheme of things pain is a kind of strange word.
It’s just a thing you sense at first, infidelity. We were moving in a new world of drugs. We met a guy called Paul Hillman who could get good grass. We never had much money so we bought in small amounts and always seemed to be driving long distances in the quest. I suppose it kept us occupied. Paul was one of those chronic potheads who are always happy to drive two hours to pick up the dregs from a fifty-dollar deal. But he was handsome in a beaten-up way, and he was mad as a cut snake, and he was not me, so he had a lot going for him from Candy’s point of view.
She started doing more and more of the dope trips with him, and after a few too many stories of car breakdowns and waiting for hours in dealers’ lounge rooms, it became kind of obvious. I accused her and she denied it. I spent a lot of time repeating variations on the phrase, “Candy, it’s really obvious you’re fucking Paul,” and she worked out many variations on, “You’re wrong. You’re simply wrong.” Finally, one cloudless day, she said, “Firstly, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Secondly, I hate the sound of your voice. Thirdly, why don’t you just fuck off?” It was as good as an admission. By now it seemed advice worth taking.
My knees felt weak. I walked to a pay phone a mile down the road. I wanted the privacy of that booth in the middle of nowhere. I rang my old friend Kay in Sydney, told her briefly my life had fallen apart, and asked if she’d put me up for a few days. She said sure, as if it was no surprise to hear from me out of the blue like that. Kay was a skinny, hyperactive, dark-haired girl whom I’d done some business with in the years before I’d met Candy. Back then, in the group I ran with, we’d all thought we were teenage drug barons. Kay used to do hash runs from India—strap a couple of kilos to her legs and walk through customs in a billowy dress that had quiet Christian written all over it—and get me to off-load the dope. These days she’d gone legitimate, and put all her money into a film-editing business, which was doing well. She ran the business with her husband Aaron, when he was sober enough, but since that was rare, she tended to be a little highly strung.
