An Uncertain Grace

by Krissy Kneen

  The waiter brings me a box of tissues with a little flower on top of it. A paper daisy. Small kindnesses. It makes me weep out loud. I turn to thank him but he is gone. I pull six tissues from the box and blow my nose into each of them till I am surrounded by soggy wads. When I can breathe more easily I put the daisy behind my ear. I am sure my eyes are puffy and my face is beetroot red but this small thing, a flower, makes me feel a little bit human again. Perhaps even attractive. Not attractive like that other girl, not all long legs and pillowy breasts and glossy hair, but someone a waiter might notice. Someone who might deserve a small floral tribute.

  *

  I think I have lost weight. I look at myself in the fogged mirror. My body, my now unfamiliar hips, legs, shoulders. Showers are certainly quicker in this body. I don’t need to blow-dry then style my hair. I don’t need to paint my face with base then powder then eyeliner then, then, then, then. I towel myself dry and I slip a robe over my shoulders. I should wash the suit properly, there are instructions on the lid of the box. There is a special disinfectant that the manufacturer provides. I am almost at the end of it now. The breakup is inevitable. Maybe there will be one more twist, a happily-ever-after ending plucked from a hope rather than a memory.

  In the narrative Liv has been finishing her assignments. In particular, an interactive narrative for her computer subject. Liv Walks Home. It won some award, the university did a big song and dance around it. Six years ago the gridiron helmet that you had to wear to view the thing was really cutting edge. I remember being curious, putting the helmet on, playing the experience. I am sure it is archived somewhere but you wouldn’t find one of those helmets anywhere anymore.

  It was nothing. Well it was something, obviously, but it wasn’t anything that you would expect. It was a representation of a spring day. You walked in the shoes of a young girl. You felt the weight of her textbooks in the backpack on her shoulder. You walked past low-set houses along a footpath and arrived at a metal gate. That is the whole of the story. The thing about it was the wall of jasmine. It was the one moment of pause in the walk. You stopped and looked at the wall of jasmine and it was just bursting into new flower and you took in breath and you smelled it and there was a flood of emotion, the same emotion every time. A sad beauty, a bouquet of ennui. There is still a jasmine bush climbing the wall along Thompson Street. It is on my way home from uni. Of course it is, because that fence is my fence. The Home in the story is my home. She made the narrative for me. She made it so that I would stop and look at the jasmine and smell it and feel something.

  I have never been able to walk past that fence in spring without feeling that same bittersweet sense of loss and new beginnings. We were breaking up. I was about to kick her out of my house. Home would no longer be home to Liv. She would never again open that metal gate with the same feeling of arrival.

  Liv Walks Home was not even a proper story, but there was a story. Everyone who experienced it felt the echoes of a story even if they didn’t know exactly what it was they were feeling.

  There is still a glimpse of hope. There is sun on your shoulders. Flowers are emerging from the bud. Things might get better. When you put the helmet on and relaxed into the experience of Liv Walks Home you would have the distinct impression that there was no need, perhaps, to hold on to your pervasive feeling of despair. She wasn’t the first person to use that technology. Gamers had been using it for months. Now there are people who film their adventures like this. For a price you can climb Mount Everest, paddle around the world in a kayak, trek up a river in Bolivia, go caving into the very depths of the world.

  After I have eaten I put the mask back on and check my progress on the bar at the bottom of the screen. I have missed three days of work. I have told them I am ill, and I am. I am sick with this. Or Liv is sick. One of us. I am not even sure how to tell which part of the feeling is me and which is her.

  There is only one more chapter. I know how this one ends. I could just skip it altogether. I don’t even need to press play, but of course I do.

  I am walking home from uni. Sun on my shoulders, dappled under the jacaranda trees. First blooms so purple underfoot. The jasmine wall is in full bloom and some patches of flower have yellowed. Dried blossoms make a pile of dirty snow in the grass below. There is still the smell, still that feeling of nostalgia, but then I reach the gate and my feelings are more complicated now. The weeping sound the hinge makes as it opens is more banshee than siren song. It is only a matter of time—hours—but I am not aware of it as I lift the clasp and settle the gate behind me once more. Our story is almost done. I don’t know the details. I don’t know about the girl who has been visiting in my absence, but I know. I look down to the cobbled path. I want to remember each irregular stone. I want to stay in this moment but everything is already moving on. He has moved on. I have. I have moved on. I have moved on and my heart is broken for the first time. I have never felt anything like this before.

  *

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  I stand before the class. Jane is in her usual place, the rest are still a nameless whole. I look out at each and every one of them and I know how it feels to look down at me from their position. I know how I seem, bigger than I really am, taking up more of their attention than I should. They feign indifference but they all really care so much about what I might think of them. I can change a day with one nod, with a tick in a margin. I could change a life just by taking one of them aside and telling them, keep going. It will all work out for you. Keep going. I could make the next generation of writers, creators, with an easy sentence or two. What have I been doing all this time? I stare out at all the opportunities I have wasted, all the women I have overlooked because they are too fat or too short or too full of fight, all the young men I have seen as competition. I have marked them down for their youth or their false bravado. I stand here and for the first time I feel the weight of them, too much for me to hold and yet I must hold them. I have been entrusted with them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say and I suppose they think I am apologising for three lectures wasted. It will be difficult for them to pick up all the content before the exam now. That is all on me.

  ‘We’re going to skip ahead,’ I say. ‘This bit isn’t really going to help you with anything. Read pages twenty to forty-five in the dossier in your own time, and we can skip over to page sixty-five…

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say again, and I am looking at Jane. She stares back, frowning, but the frown softens a little and she nods.

  ‘Okay. Character. In the classic hero’s journey, the character goes on a quest and is transformed by it. But this is memoir. Do we really think a person learns from their actions? Do they change?’

  ‘No. Sir.’ It is a young woman in the second row. She puts up her hand belatedly and I wave it away.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, sir,’ she says.

  ‘Can you think of an example in memoir, in all the books we have read so far, where the character changes?’

  Hands are raised. I point to them one by one and they give me their examples and I nod. I force myself to say good. I say good, good, good. It feels good. It does. I say it some more until all the raised hands are exhausted.

  ‘So if people don’t change in real life? Why do they change in a memoir?’

  More hands raised. More good students trying to please me. Nothing has changed. They are the same students, I am the same lecturer in the same threadbare jumper, but I am pleased. They have pleased me with their enthusiasm.

  I still have her skin on me. I still feel her hurt, her disappointment, her terrible bittersweet scent of ennui.

  I wonder if the weeks will scour her body from my skin. I will become myself. I will return to myself unchanged because we don’t change, not ever. Or at least, I have not ever before.

  *

  After the lecture I nod to each and every one of the students as they leave. It might be too late to begin to learn their names but I have picked up a few during t
he lecture and maybe tomorrow I will remember a few more. How long will it be till I sink back into forgetting? I hope it isn’t too soon. I want to try living in her skin for just a while longer.

  I walk up to Z Block to the post. I have packaged up the suit, and the little memory stick, a little slice of her memory now shared by me, is nestled in its box on top of it all. I tear a slip of paper from my notebook. I wish I had had the forethought to pick a nice card.

  Thank you. I write the words carefully. My handwriting is notoriously hard to read. The students tell me this each semester but in all these years I haven’t bothered to change it, to make it any easier to read. I put the note in with the memory stick and close the box. I am about to seal it when I change my mind, open the box. Take out the paper. I pick up the pen and let it hover over the paper. This is really good work. I underline good, then cross it out. Above it I write the word extraordinary.

  It doesn’t seem like enough, this one sentence to explain what I have lived through this past week. But there are no words to encapsulate it. You would have to live it. The ordinary wonder of it. The extraordinary wonder.

  For what it is worth, I am truly sorry.

  Not enough. Not nearly enough.

  She will publish it and I will not complain. I won’t sue her. I won’t comment in interviews. If anybody asks me what I think I will tell them that it is an extraordinary work.

  I press the padded bag to seal it. I hesitate at the automated payment machine. Real mail is so expensive. It is a luxury for birthdays and Christmas. Big department stores use mail for shopping but they always cover the costs and they send the packages by private courier. It is so rare, even now, to send an original artefact and not a 3D printout that you download and print at home.

  Maybe I should have written that she had changed me. That I was a better person now. That I would never be that kind of man again. But it probably isn’t true. I will probably be returned to myself in time.

  I walk home down Thompson Street. It is still winter and the jasmine bush has a million buds, pink pushing to white but none of them quite ready to burst. I pick a bud and crush it between my fingers. It smells of bitter sap and I am a little disappointed, but I stand and stare at the vine anyway and remember what it is like when it is full of flowers. I remember what it is like to be flooded with a sense of hope for the coming months. I almost feel it. Not quite.

  I keep walking. I’ll make sure I come back in a week, maybe two. It will be easy to remember the feeling more clearly, but will I be remembering? Or experiencing it anew? The flowers will be out by then, the sun will be a little warmer. The wind will be less chill. I will be at a little remove from the last few days. It will be spring, come around once more.

  PART 2

  RONNIE

  WHEN I WAS a child we went to the ocean. It was the happiest time. There was sun. There were my feet in the sand, the heat of it between my splayed toes and then the sudden hard cool at the wave line. I would run back and forth along the tidemarks, laughing when the water tugged the sand out from beneath my toes, running back, frightened but excited by it too, this sense of something more powerful than me waiting to take me out into the abyss.

  On those sunlit days my father and my sister raced each other out past the breakers. Their strong backs like two rafts made of muscle, bobbing in parallel, fighting the waves. Winning. They were always in competition with each other, my sister broad shouldered, almost as tall as my father. Bullheaded like my father. Matching him stroke for stroke, and the race to the buoy with very little in it, one hand up and helicoptering down to touch the winning mark a second before the other. The winner would pant and cheer and lie on his or her back and punch a fist towards the impossibly blue sky. The loser would rage and snarl and breaststroke back to shore, snatching up their towel, covering me with a dusting of sand that stung my eyes and gritted between my teeth.

  It’s that kind of beach. Too bright. Too hot. And I am standing on the shore wondering if these are my memories or someone else’s idea of ocean that somehow corresponds with my own. I squint and search the horizon for a buoy, and two strong backs swimming towards it, but the ocean is steady and empty. The breath of water rising and falling as if it were sleeping.

  When I was a child I was earth-bound. I was not the same kind of human as my sister and my father. Big seals, both of them, slippery in the surf, uncatchable. Sometimes we would play this game, if you were an animal, and they were dolphins, whales, eels, salmon. I reached for animals like lions or panthers, cats with teeth, but my answers were always lies. If I were an animal I would be a pipi. My toes dig for them now in the cold wet sand, as a wave comes and snatches the sand away. I am now, as I was then, a furtive, hard-shelled crustacean dumbly waiting for a wave to take the sand from under my feet. Wanting more than anything to dig down into the cold dark, out of sight, out of mind.

  To begin this experiment I will need to swim. This is what she told me, detailing the journey, carefully letting me know what to expect. Her name is Liv. They took me to her in a room with a table. A floral tablecloth, a pot of tea, sugar cubes, milk in a jug. I almost sobbed to see it laid out like that, these ordinary trappings of an ordinary life. An ordinary middle-aged woman with dark hair pulled severely back into a ponytail. Her hair was a little long for someone her age; some grey in it. No make-up. She narrowed her eyes when she saw my face for the first time. It was swollen and bruised on the right-hand side. That is pretty common. People like me get hit in prison. People like me deserve to get hit, and prison gives us what we deserve.

  Liv was dressed in army boots and a shapeless linen dress. When she lifted her arms there was hair there. I noticed it with a start as if the sight of armpit hair had sent a little pulse of electricity through me. It was vaguely sexual, that unexpected pubic thatch. And then the slippery slope of association tumbling me down to the inevitable. I looked at her armpits and I thought of her crotch and the patch under her arm might as well have been the little triangle between her legs and then again she might shave it and thinking of the hairless place…

  I shellfish down into myself, now as I did then when I met her, curling up into the calcium carbonate whorls of me. She is monitoring my thoughts. I try to think of nothing. To unremember the lift of her arm. But when you try to not think of something you fail. The only way out is to replace this thought with another.

  This is the only reason I am able to wade out, up to my waist in water. I do it to distract myself. A slap of cold shrivelling my genitals up into a tiny useless packet inside my swimming trunks.

  Good.

  It is Liv’s voice in my head and I can’t be sure if I put it there or if she is speaking to me. She will be in my head. She will be with me, that’s what she said and I agreed to it. I said yes. Anything to escape that place. To suspend my sentence.

  Good work, Ronnie. Now you will have to duck your head under. Remember, it’s okay. You will be able to breathe.

  Sentences. Hers. I nod. Will she be able to see me nodding?

  I’ve been briefed. She talked me through the process and then we lived it. The first part of it anyway. In the simulation Liv drove me in a car. I’m not sure why there were details like the empty chip packet on the floor, the rattle of a water bottle marking the sharp turns along the windy road, the broken window that only wound up halfway, letting the air conditioning out and the scent of salt and sand in.

  There was no car.

  She drove me in a car but there was no car. I spent the whole drive trying to get my head around it. Nothing was real and yet she was real, but not real in the way you would expect. She was driving me to the ocean just like my dad used to drive us, only there was no car and no ocean and she was with me but not in any way that I could really understand. It was something to do with my brain. When I counted down from ten I was falling asleep like you would for any operation, only waking in a car didn’t mean I was awake in the real world.

  There was no car. And yet I stepped out of the
car and she leaned out of the drivers window and she touched my arm and I started to cry.

  This is okay. You are okay. I’ll be watching. I’ll be with you. When you make contact I will be monitoring the contact. Don’t worry. It will feel strange, but I’ll be here.

  Put your head under the water now. She says this and she isn’t really talking. Or there isn’t really any water. I try to imagine myself in some high-tech room with monitors and machines that beep and a screen with my brainwaves on it. Liv, maybe sitting in front of the console, talking into a headset, or maybe sitting beside my hospital bed, talking to me, or typing the words. She briefed me but I didn’t ask all the questions, or the right questions. Yes, I said, I understand. But I didn’t really understand.

  A wave comes in and rushes against my chest and I feel my heart racing. I feel the panic coming. I am at the beach and my sister and my father are out there, racing each other. I have wandered into the water but I won’t put my head under. I am not genetically wired for water as they are. I am someone else’s son, no matter what they call me or what I call them. They’re dolphining out past the breakers and I take a deep and panicked breath. I feel my shell slamming shut. I feel the grit of sand in my mouth. I duck down under the water in my awkward clam-like way.

  She said I would be able to breathe.

  There is no water.

  I am in a room hooked up to monitors.