by Krissy Kneen
PARK
Brisbane 1990
When I stopped running I was in a park. Light fell like snow onto the grass. Solid light. This is what I noticed first, the painterly quality of the light. The park was beautiful. The trees were solid patches of darkness. I had somehow run myself out of the world and here I was in a painting by Edward Hopper, an in-between place of flat shapes and silence and all the panic drained out and dissipated. It was a perfect summer evening. My eyes were still red and sore from weeping. My chest was still tight. Behind me was the memory of a storm, not a gentle storm, but the kind that rips the roof off a house and flings cars into a flooded street. Sirens, screaming, bodies ripped from the hands of lovers and raced away into the turmoil of a drowning.
I sat on one of the well-lit benches and there was a downy light in my lap. I had picked up my satchel before running: I had a book and a pad of cartridge paper and my little box of pastels and a pen. Everything I needed, for a while at least. I was a small vessel and I could bob here in the calm waters until some other vessel came along.
I sat until the shrieking in my head had settled. I sipped the silence and felt myself relax into the void. I could stay here, of course, calcifying moment by slow moment. I could spend the rest of my life sitting in glorious silence on this very bench.
I thought about sex. If I were to live here forever on this bench in this park that might have been painted by Hopper, I would need to find somewhere else to have sex.
I had had sex in this park. I glanced around me and found the spot, a place near a tree, on a scratchy bed of leaves. My body remembered the crackle of them, the thrill of air on my thighs as the boy flipped up my long skirt and slipped inside me just as quickly. The small half-hearted tussle between him and me. The shrugging into sex despite the fact that it was daylight and there were offices and people readying themselves to spill out from their air-conditioned comfort and into this very park. It was quick and kind of fun although I didn’t really like him very much. And I didn’t orgasm. I remembered that.
So, yes, I could in fact have sex in this park, or in the toilet block or in the shrubbery hugging the fence a little way from my bench. In fact the shrubbery could be a place to sleep, I suspected, all snuggled and scrubby and safe through the balmy Brisbane nights. I could sleep in the comfort of crawl spaces, under shrubs, in cupboards, hidden under a bed. This was my preferred sleeping option actually. A water fountain, too. There was one just near to me. All the comforts of a house without the rigid trap of walls to bounce off. No roommates to watch and judge me. No Jessica and no Brian. No address to be found at, just a series of comforting spaces with grass and trees and the scent of night jasmine and all this blissful silence.
I looked around me now as if I were inspecting a property that I might purchase. Yes, I thought. I could just stay here.
THE TOILET BLOCK
The boy sat on the bench, waiting. He positioned himself under a light, in full view. I viewed him there, sleek and pale, furtive, but with a sudden calm descending when someone came by. I was hidden under a hedge, pressed between the woody scramble of it, against a wire fence. I had a coat wrapped around me and a satchel for a pillow.
Everywhere the insect rustling of leaves, a balmy, cockroachy, Brisbane summer kind of night and me out in it. I was black on black and he was all golden glow.
There was the toilet block nearby. This is how it seemed to work. One boy, this golden boy, would sit, jiggling his knee till some other boy arrived. This one was a dark shadow, edging by his arc of park-light. The new man waited outside the toilet block for a while, pacing idly as if he were just filling in time before popping back to work.
Then the deliberate stride into the squat brick building, a significant pause. The golden boy now still and upright, tight inside his pale clothing, erect, straining up from his seat as if he were a volcanic eruption about to occur.
When he stood he was like a soldier on parade. All the straight-armed tension in his body turning stride into march. I watched him glance around stiffly, checking. How long does it take to get a head job in a toilet block? Or was there more to it? Was there a partial removal of clothing, a bare-backed fucking, one knee braced on the toilet seat? I imagined the golden boy bent over the cistern in that sickly blue light they use to thwart junkies looking for a vein.
The thing about homelessness is that there is nowhere comfortable and private for masturbation. I clamped my hand between my legs and nestled my pubic bone against it. I rubbed quickly. No one would notice me down here in the dark crawl space under a hedge. No one would expect a human being to settle down for the night in a claustrophobic place like this.
The boys took significantly longer than I did. I watched, smoothing my skirt down over my drawn-up knees as another, older man crept into the spotlight and nestled down in the waiting space.
I wondered what would happen if I needed to use the toilet. Would I be holding up the queue? I closed my eyes, dozed, opened them. A new man sitting, smoking, waiting. I felt the throb in my bladder, but if I just held on I knew it would pass.
There was no panic. That was the strangest thing. For the first time in so long I was calm. Perhaps I was happy. Perhaps I was invisible. When someone caught sight of me they looked away quickly enough; their gaze didn’t stick.
I still walked but it was different, no longer the kind of walking that was almost a chase. I was not outwalking something that frightened me. I barely looked around to see if anything was chasing me. There was the breeze on my skin. Sharp scents. The colors were heightened, like the times I had tried LSD. There was some sleep, taken in small doses. At all other times there was sound and movement and color and I was happy, perhaps ecstatic. I knew that I couldn’t live like this forever. I knew that I must come to some kind of resolution, but for now I was completely content.
I was floating down the hill toward the city when a small girl turned around and suddenly my invisibility was shattered. Her eyes narrowed as she spotted me and she tugged at her mother’s arm.
“Mummy.”
“What?”
“Mummy.”
Her mother glanced in the direction of her pointing finger.
“Look at that lady.”
Her mother looked at me then quickly away. She shushed her child and I heard her whispered words. “Don’t stare at her.”
Me. Don’t stare at me.
In the city I glanced at my reflection in a hundred glass windows. My clothes, my face, my eyes.
And I knew suddenly why I was no longer frightened for myself. I had become the person people are frightened of. I had slipped somehow from the inside to the outside of everything. And there I stood, staring at them through the window of a department store.
I have left, I thought to myself. Finally after all of these years of trying, I have actually left the world.
I walked though the streets of Brisbane and I remembered and I felt a longing. There had been no one touching my skin for almost a month. No physical interaction, no conversation. No people.
I practiced remembering. The couch. The one that felt like velvet and had to be sponged afterward because it stained. The sisal carpet, the one with the rope burns. In the cupboard, where I had felt the safest, despite the limited opportunities for movement. On the balcony, and only because of the drugs and the hour of the morning. On the boardwalk in the botanical gardens where we could pretend I was just sitting on his lap. In the archbishop’s garden, and only because I couldn’t see the fascination she had with it. In the bus stop because the bus was delayed. On the train because the train was delayed. In the restaurant because the food was delayed. In the kitchen because of the implements. In the garden because of the dirt. In the bath because of the lack of dirt. In the bed. Sometimes, even in the bed.
I would shift back on the park bench and expect to feel the hardness of a penis behind me. I watched two birds fall onto each other, a raised twitchy tail and I could feel it, this slipping inside each other, when wa
s the last time I was held, really held and for no other reason than for pleasure?
The birds parted. Wrens. They were wrens. I was almost certain of it. Their coupling had been cute and quick and bouncy. I wanted that kind of sudden sex. I wanted to participate in it, not watch it from the sidelines. But most of all I wanted, suddenly, just to be held.
NIGHTMARE
Brisbane 2008
In my dream. The thin girl is trying to break in through the window at the back of the house. She is myself, only starved and hungry. She is looking for somebody else to fill her. She frightens me, all wild hair and mouth like a boiling kettle, and I push my shoulder against the window until she is gone. The sudden relief of her absence. I rest against the wall. I catch my breath. My dream self realizes suddenly that the front door has been left wide open. She is inside.
I close my eyes in horror and I wake. She is inside. She is with me now, even as I lie in the sweat and the shivering of my bed. She is all the things that have been said to me. She is not the girlfriend kind of girl, and yet I roll over and I touch the warm shoulder of my husband, my beautiful lover who smiles in his sleep, remembering that I am here and that I love him.
I read back over my life. I see myself lying in the wonderfully suggestible place between orgasms. Some body or another in contact with my own. I hear their voices drifting with me into sleep. Not my type. Not the girlfriend type. So many repetitions on a theme. I ingest their words, I am soft and open in the afterglow and I take this into myself. The words exit my skin like splinters of glass working their way out of me over the course of years.
I roll over and I hold him, my husband.
“I had a nightmare,” I whisper and he snuggles back against me sleepily.
“Poor darling,” he says, and “I love you,” and “You’re beautiful.”
RAIN
Brisbane 1991
I was sitting in a doorway, not a particularly large doorway, not a comfortable one, but it was free from vomit despite a distant urinous stench emanating from the far corners. I had a quarter bottle of scotch. Scotch was not my drink of choice, but it was cheap, and they didn’t have any small bottles of vodka, and the day was cold.
The man at the shop gave it to me in a paper bag and I folded the top of the bag down with the bottle inside, as if no one would know that I was sitting in a doorway drinking a quarter bottle of scotch if I hid the label.
The man at the bottle shop nodded toward the window, acknowledging the rain falling, quick and loud.
“Lovely weather,” he said to make conversation. I was supposed to say something back, perhaps something witty, something to augment his little joke. But I had spoken to no one in so many days. I felt my heart spring in my chest, a small animal inside me attempting to scramble away from the nice bottle shop man. I blinked and struggled with my expression. I said nothing, handed the coins across the counter, took the brown paper bag.
The rain came down like this sometimes. It was a tropical phenomenon, this drenching in the heart of summer, tearing the breathless heat apart and hinting at the possibility of ice.
In the past I would watch the occasional downpour from my window, or run out into it and race back into a hot shower and dry clothes, laughing with the manic energy induced by sudden storms.
Now there would be no shower. Now there would be wet shoes and a slow iciness creeping into my bones. Now there would be nothing but shivering and feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t want to cry but thinking about not crying made my shoulders heave. I took another swig from the bottle.
I was sitting in a doorway drinking scotch from a paper bag. It was raining. My skirt smelled old and damp. The pages of my notebook would be curling. My beetling words inside the notebook would be bleeding onto the page. There was a night ahead of me and another day and another night and more again and the idea of it exhausted me.
“I’ve got to find a place,” I said the words out loud. I found that I did that a lot. The lack of communication had somehow changed my relationship to speech. Sometimes a word would slip out of my mouth. Sometimes a whole sentence. Sometimes I caught myself in the middle of an entire conversation, questions and answers, a heated sparring with myself.
“I’m going mad,” I told myself, tucking my shoes up a step and out of the back spray of rain. “I am talking to myself,” I said to myself. “And I have to get out of the rain.”
THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SECURITY
There is a bleakness common to all government buildings. The mood-affecting color schemes; posters, a repetition of warnings we will read but not heed. I stared at an antismoking poster and considered ducking outside for a cigarette. A safe-sex poster and I thought about unprotected sex. Alcohol, violence. I had been waiting for over an hour and a grim cocktail was percolating inside me. The music didn’t help. It was tragic radio. Not the kind of radio I would choose to listen to, but the fug of sound that is chosen for its inability to offend. I was, of course, offended by the gray carpet of music, not to mention the actual gray carpet which seemed to have cigarette burns in it despite the no-smoking signs. I still felt like a cigarette. I glanced at a poster for domestic violence and wondered if I would kill for one.
When they called my name I was twitchy as a junky. I had knotted the end of my skirt and it dragged high against my calf. There were little balls of paper, torn corners from a magazine, a little pyramid of them piled next to my chair. I didn’t remember doing this, but I recognized the architecture constructed by my own restless fingers. My calling card, this miniature nest like something a bowerbird might construct.
I gathered my things. Papers, pens, my satchel. Things fell from my bag that I didn’t know I had, seedpods, cigarette papers—a brand I’d never heard of. I felt I had been sleepwalking, gleaning the detritus of the world without consciousness.
When I had collected the various bits and pieces of my life I scurried toward the counter. The man, boy, he was no more than a boy, looked at me. I saw him sniff. I wondered if my clothes had started to smell like a homeless person; that nasty mix of scalp and urine and cigarette smoke that we draw away from when we encounter it on public transport.
I had not spoken for many days. When he asked if he could help me his words were loud and pointed. Could he help me? I wondered if he could. I wondered if it would be possible to help me. This seemed suddenly like so huge a question I could barely find a sentence to begin the interaction.
“I have no money.”
I swayed back in my chair, overwhelmed by the initiation of what must inevitably become a conversation.
“You’re unemployed?”
I nodded. He was waiting for more and so I dragged myself forward in my chair. “I lost my job,” I told him and he nodded, making notes.
“When did you become unemployed? ”
I counted back. Not so long ago but it seemed like a lifetime.
“Maybe three months ago.”
“Savings?”
I shook my head.
“Address?”
I shook my head.
“You don’t have an address? Where have you been living?”
I shrugged and leaned back in the hard plastic chair, “Nowhere in particular.”
Such a complicated conversation. I was exhausted by it. Behind me there was a woman with a child that had begun to wind up into that terrible shrieking only children can manage. Outside men with tattoos on their necks dragged frantically on cigarettes clutched in the shelter of their fists. Military-style smoking; or prison. A man in the corner of the room was rocking ever so slightly backwards and forwards. His lips twitched to a barely contained inner monologue.
“Are you homeless?”
I looked back toward the boy and he seemed suddenly concerned. Was I homeless? I had no place to be in particular, but what does that mean exactly?
“Maybe. I suppose so.”
“Where have you been sleeping? ”
I thought about the crawl space behind the bushes in Albert Park
. I thought about Laura’s empty house, while she was at work, her leather couch and the little stretch of grass at the side of her pool. I thought about the place at Highgate Hill where you could see the whole world. If you lay there for long enough little purple flowers puddled in your clothing. I felt like I should tell him all of this, because the bare truth of it sounded harsh. I scuffed my Docs against the threadbare gray carpet.
“In a park mostly,” I told him and it sounded melodramatic. Homeless girl, living in a park. I wanted to tell him that I had no money but never drank instant coffee. I wanted to explain about my afternoons in the cinema with the free choc-tops and the free broken quiches from Aromas. I wanted to point to the man who had stopped rocking and who was standing now, his lips forming silent words. In the scheme of things, I wanted to say, I was coddled.
He pressed a form into my hand.
“Fill in as much of this as you can and bring it straight back to the counter,” he told me. I took his form and the pen he handed to me and I stood without explaining myself at all.
I read the questions. Name, date of birth, address. I needed a cigarette. I held the pen in my fist, struggled to remember the correct spelling of my name.
I needed a cigarette and sex and alcohol. I needed to be somewhere where there was sun and wind and little purple flowers. I needed to be somewhere where the tears that had begun to obscure my vision could fall neatly into the dirt and grass where they would be gone and no one would see them.
