An Uncertain Grace

by Krissy Kneen

  ‘Are you old enough to have seen a narwhale in real life?’

  ‘I am one hundred and twenty-nine years old, if that was what you were really asking, and yes, I am old enough to have seen a narwhale, but I never did, not in real life. One of so many regrets. I saw sharks and I saw southern right whales on migration and I caught and ate real wild fish for a bit when I was a girl.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Nope. Barbaric. We were barbarians.’ She holds an invisible knife in her fist and makes stabbing motions towards me. It makes me laugh. She slips her hand easily into the crook of my arm and it feels good to walk like this. It feels right to have the warm fragility of her fingers clasped around me. I squeeze my arm tight against my waist and it is nice to feel her fingers there. ‘My shout,’ she tells me when we get to the snake of a queue. I begin to protest but she waves my chipped wrist away. ‘Let me have the pleasure of taking you on a date. Just for old time’s sake.’ She winks and her smile makes her look half her age. I am filled with a wave of sweet warmth. I really like Liv. I like her very much.

  I hold L’s hand and there is the warmth of a thigh settling against mine under the sheet. The mattress is slightly damp. We’ll have to air it. L smells of petrol from the motorboat. I bury my head in the dark strands of hair and breathe in.

  In the ocean dome a shark swooped suddenly out of the dark ocean and I jumped and felt Liv’s fingers tangle through my own. We sat like that through the rest of the session. At one point Liv moved her fingers, caressing mine with skin as fine as silk. She leaned over and whispered, ‘Young people like you have kept me alive for years. Have you ever given blood?’

  I nodded. A nautilus bobbed through the water, making a delicate circle around our heads with its paper-thin shell.

  ‘Well, maybe your blood gave me another year or two. You might be inside me, your cells in my veins. Think of that.’

  And then the thing happened with my stomach, that feeling like a lift has started before you were ready, your stomach rising up while your body has begun to fall. It is a feeling I get with L sometimes.

  Now in the damp bed I move my leg towards L’s hips to see if I get that same up-and-down sensation but I don’t. It is just the jut of a bony hip in the soft plump of my thigh. I try to imagine what our legs look like beneath the sheet. I am at centre now and my clitoris is the size of a small penis, hanging softly above my vulva. The moist cavity has swelled and the lips might just be a ballsack if you were to glance at them. I have seen L naked too, shrunken balls, or swollen labia. It is impossible to tell and rude to ask but even thinking about it now makes my cock swell. If L has a little slit there my cock would be pointing right towards it. If I were to shove and come up against a tender resistance I could flip L over and push myself between the tempting globes of a peach-like arse. My mouth waters just to think of it, and there, finally, that falling lifting feeling. I shift my fingers and start to stroke L’s hand. My shaft is bigger than it has ever been, more a cock than a clit and I wonder how big it would get if I started to move past twilight over to the other side. It is so big now that it feels like the skin will split if it swells any more. I shift my hips. The urge to push against L is overwhelming. I shift just a little bit forward so that the thing can just touch the tip of L’s hip. I swallow. Just a little seesaw motion and the sensation is intense.

  ‘Hey.’

  L shifts away from me. Knees snap closed. Fingers are extracted from my grasp.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ says L. ‘The physical changes are pretty strong. I remember I kept testing them out all the time.’

  ‘What? Like sex?’

  ‘No. You know I’m not wired for that. Just touching and exploring. Sometimes I’d have my hands down my pants and wouldn’t even realise it.’

  L rests the palm of a hand against my chest. I suppose it is a gesture of solidarity to make up for being snappy with me.

  ‘Hey, M. I know you’re sexual. You know it’s all right to do that stuff with someone else. I don’t mind. I won’t love you any less.’

  I shrug. ‘I don’t want anyone else,’ I say, but even as I say it I am not sure it’s true. I do want someone else but not a specific someone. Just a body, any body to try my new skin against.

  I take deep breaths. My skin shrinks back into itself. I practise calm.

  L picks up my hand again and strokes my fingers. ‘I love you, M.’

  ‘I know.’

  I feel like crying again. I frown. Maybe this is what it is like in the dead middle of twilight. Maybe emotional upheavals are part of the journey, just like erratic body hair and the gamey smell of my sweat.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Olivia’s going to die.’

  L turns suddenly towards me. ‘What?’ That quiet honey voice, louder now, sharper than I have ever heard it.

  ‘Olivia’s sick. She’s going to die.’ My mother Olivia, but also Liv. I don’t tell L this but I spend a bit of time juggling the two things, wondering at how one mirrors the other.

  L pulls me close. A body that is tight and warm and sweet. My own flesh melding with it as if we are the same person. This is how I want to be when I die, moulded around L. Indistinguishable from L’s flesh. I am wrapped in a hug that is so tight it is almost vicious. I let my skin be ravaged by it.

  ‘Tell me,’ L says, not letting me go, not letting me pull away even an inch.

  And so I start. I tell it. There isn’t much I know. Just the internet searches that I found and all the warning signs that I didn’t heed. I track back through the history that binds me to my mother. I find it is all still sharp, all the little damages, death by a thousand cuts. When I finish talking I am exhausted by it. I feel like I have been bled out. I remember that my blood may have been used to keep Liv alive, each annual transfusion keeping death away from her door. If only my blood could do that for my own mother. Her blood is my blood and yet there is still no way for me to save her.

  ‘And the terrible thing is it doesn’t make me love her any more than I did before I knew.’

  An awful admission. I bite my lip hard as if to punish my mouth for uttering it.

  ‘Well.’ L still hasn’t let me out of the bear hug I am trapped in. My body is alive to L’s body, I am aware of L’s heartbeat, calm and steady inside L’s bony chest. It settles me to listen to it, steady as a clock describing an eternity. ‘I don’t see why it would change anything. Well, not yet. All it has done is remind you that your relationship with your mother is temporal. You knew that. Now you have a shorter timeline. The way I see it you can change it if you want, but you can just keep on the same way. It isn’t an imperative. Olivia is still the same person even if she’s sick.’

  ‘But shouldn’t I feel, sad…or, I don’t know. Something…?’

  ‘You can if you want to. Or not. We are all in the process of dying. We each have our own schedule for it. That’s all.’

  L will die. I lie in the hug and I am aware of that coming death as if it is a physical thing, a rope, circling L’s heart, ready to pull tight and snuff out the regular pulse altogether. The way L describes it, it is just natural. No need to do anything but acknowledge that death is a part of life.

  L will die. My mother will die. But first, and in a matter of weeks, Liv will die.

  ‘Maybe,’ L says, ‘it’s time to hurry things up with your mother. Pack all the years of one-sentence conversations into a shorter time.’

  ‘Talk to her more?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  I hug L as close as I can. Our bodies are so tightly pressed together that we might as well be lovers, but we are not. My brand new body, which I have only explored through surface contact. In one hundred and ten years I too will be teetering on the edge of life as Liv is now. Every night that passes might be her last night.

  L’s breathing deepens. Those brown arms grow limp, L rolls away, presenting me with a back, the shirt pulled up, a sliver of chocolatey skin winking at me. I loo
k at that patch of skin. I want to lick it. I am as far from sleep as I have ever been.

  I roll off the mattress and make my way to the bathroom. I squat over the pot and listen to the sound of my piss hitting the metal. There is a mushroom growing out of the wall under the sink. Or a toadstool, I don’t really know the difference. I watch the curl of it, ridged underneath like the belly of the whale in the ocean dome, liver-spotted like Liv’s delicate skin. I lift my wrist to my mouth and I whisper, ‘Text Liv Harbison.’ I pause, not sure what I should say. I was wondering if you want to meet me for lunch…Another pause. A day might be like a year to her. Each morning brings the possibility of death. Tomorrow, I say, adding, if you’re not already busy.

  Her answer buzzes in my head almost immediately. I thought she might be asleep; I didn’t expect to hear back from her so soon.

  I’m supposed to be working tomorrow but fuck it, I’ll wag.

  I send her the address and the time. I take the pot to the window and tip it out. A few metres down my piss bleeds out into the river. Just a drop in the ocean, as they say. I think of all the run-off, all the chemical waste, all the dirt flushed out of abandoned buildings every time it floods. Every time I scramble out of the boat my ankles get red and itchy. There is a reason these buildings are condemned. There is a reason my mother hates me sleeping over with L.

  When I climb into bed L is just a warm sack of flesh and bone. Absent, not here with me at all. If L were to die right now—this body, here, growing steadily colder—would the mind just drift off into the dream L is in now? Would the L I know and love continue to be L…incorporeally?

  I hug L close and let the warmth of a living, breathing body spread across mine. Our equally ungendered bodies in lock step with each other, L’s breath, my breath, L’s heartbeat my heartbeat. And soon I will join L’s consciousness, tangled in sleep.

  *

  The dying woman settles at the table opposite me. I dreamed of death, waking, gasping, clutching at the warm body beside me, then plunging down into even more death. I dreamed my consciousness existed in the earth where my skull had been buried. All I could feel was dampness. All I could see were the articulated soft bodies of worms that had taken up residence inside my skull. One of the worms asked me if I knew that it could reproduce asexually. I woke with my head throbbing, a slither in my ears, which may just have been the lapping of the river at the window of the unit below.

  ‘I have no appetite,’ she says to me, almost crossly. ‘Food used to be a pleasure.’

  She has ordered a salad and a glass of wine. None of my friends are drinkers. L doesn’t touch the stuff. I hesitated before ordering a glass of wine for myself. Now it has arrived I wonder if it was a mistake. One, two sips and I am feeling light-headed already.

  ‘You said you’re still working?’

  ‘Oh god, yes,’ she says. ‘I’ll work till the day I drop, and longer. I’ll need the cash.’

  I frown, but it would be rude to ask about her debts.

  ‘Gene therapy for this and for that. I have a pill box the size of a handbag,’ she offers. ‘Still, can’t complain. Lucky to be a rich white Australian, right?’

  All of her comments feel barbed. I am not sure if she is having a go at me for being rich.

  ‘This gender thing is a final indulgence, I suppose. If I make it to the middle. I am beginning to think I won’t.’

  ‘I’d be so frightened.’

  She nods.

  ‘I’m practising for a couple of hours a day but I’ll never be ready for it.’

  ‘Practising for death?’

  She laughs. ‘Yes. Long story. It is more complicated than you might expect.’

  Liv picks at her salad. She places a lettuce leaf on her tongue and holds it in her mouth for a moment before chewing.

  ‘I will miss eating. I will miss flavour the most. They didn’t think of eating when they prepped for the afterlife. Tasting is something we will not be able to replicate for quite a while. Did you know an octopus tastes with all of its body? The ones that are left, that is.’

  ‘You talk as if maybe you won’t die.’

  ‘Oh no. I’ll die. But maybe, if it works, something of me will live on. It won’t be me, because I’m inseparable from my body. But it will be a soft echo of who I was. In theory I will remember.’ She stares off towards the busy street outside. I see her chest rise and hold for a long moment before she exhales. ‘Or it won’t work out the way it does with rats and I’ll be completely gone, or worse, I’ll be a monstrous version of myself.’

  ‘You know you’re going to have to explain all this to me now.’

  She nods and smiles and I feel tight in my chest again. There’s that leap in my groin and I can feel the distribution of blood shifting.

  ‘I am. I want to. Even now, when I’ve outlived everyone I love, I feel the need to confess. Isn’t it silly?’

  ‘What do you mean, something will live on? Are they going to keep you alive on a machine?’

  ‘You could say that. But there’s flesh in it too. It’s called wetware, like a human brain. That’s the best medium for the quantum probabilities of consciousness. I won’t have a whole body either. They tried it—lucky I wasn’t dead in time for that debacle. I’ll just be something like a brain, getting on with my day job. Making ends meet…I wonder where that phrase came from? Well, no “ends” for this old boiler. Just more work. They only want me for my brain, you know.’

  ‘And your body…?’

  She moves her finger across her neck as if to slice her head off. She laughs. ‘We are all dying. I will be dead soon. Weeks, probably. A month at most. And there is so much I didn’t do.’

  I have finished my pie. I have finished my wine. Her little plate of leaves is almost empty.

  ‘Come on.’

  I stand and run to the till and swipe my chip before she can protest.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To do something neither of us has ever done before.’

  She grins and picks up her bag and wavers to her feet, a little unsteadily before finding her balance. I rush to her side and hold out my arm for her to take. She takes my hand instead and her fingers intersect with mine.

  ‘Great,’ she says, grinning. ‘I knew you would be good fun. I knew it the moment I saw you in the clinic.’

  ‘Ready for an adventure?’

  ‘One last adventure,’ she says. ‘Let’s do it.’

  Our swimming pool is pretty beautiful. I know it, but I have always resented it. None of my other school friends had a pool and if they did it was just a communal pool for the whole building to share, a three-metre stretch of blue tiles with some tepid water in it. Our pool is landscaped to look like a rock pool. There are chiselled slabs of slate around the edges, the delicate curl of ferns. Because we are in the penthouse we have twice as much space as everyone else and the pool takes up half of it. The water is chilled so that even in the height of summer it is a refreshing change from the relentless heat of the day.

  I take my clothes off. I do it in one hit so that I can’t change my mind about it. I stand before her and I try to feel nothing but pride as I feel her looking at the unusual configuration of my parts. She stares. Her eyes scan the length of me. She seems curious about all of it, and not just my genitals. She looks at each of my toes, the bony ankles, the skinny calves. She doesn’t flinch when she gets to my genitals. She takes them in, lingering over what might be my penis, or not, and then stretching her gaze up towards my stomach, my flat chest, my armpits, my neck.

  ‘My mother said she won’t be home till dark,’ I tell her, and she nods.

  ‘I thought we might swim.’

  ‘Just swim?’

  I feel the flush start at my chest and work its way up my throat, pinking the skin into blotches.

  ‘No,’ I tell her. ‘I thought we would start by swimming.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘If something else happens you might remember it after your body dies.
’

  ‘Yes. Or I might not.’

  I can feel the itchy red blotches staining my cheeks. I put the back of my hand to my face and feel the heat of it.

  ‘Is this a parting gift to me, M? A gift for the dying?’

  I try to calm my breathing. Maybe this was a mistake; I feel nothing but embarrassment.

  ‘I haven’t done it before,’ I tell her. I am embarrassed by this, but it is the truth.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Any of it.’ I want nothing more than to dive into the water and swim to the safe overhang of rocks but I stand my ground. I try to match Liv in her honesty.

  ‘Sex?’

  I nod.

  ‘You have never had sex?’

  Again a nod.

  She looks away from me then. She stops to consider the careful landscaping. There is a little shrub with tiny pink flowers on it and her eyes move to the pretty branches as she considers.

  ‘And you want to know what it’s like?’

  My head is on a spring, nodding up and down like an idiot.

  ‘You might want to rethink that decision,’ she says, and then she unclips the fastenings on her jumpsuit and lets it fall in a heap around her boots. She lifts the shirt carefully over her head, her short hair catches on the fabric and when her shirt is on the ground her hair is sticking up in erratic clumps. She is standing in her bra and pants. It is a push-up bra, I notice, and she unsnaps it at the front and when she takes it off her breasts nestle down and flatten against the bones of her chest. The nipples are pulled tight like two little pebbles, hard and dark on the paper-thin skin. She bends and slips her underpants down over her hips and she still has a prominent vulva. She has only just begun transitioning and all I can see of it is a slight protuberance where her clitoris has swelled into a little thumb. The swelling indicates that she (this body is still feminine, after all) is aroused. The lips of the vulva are thick and protruding, but that might be the gene therapy beginning to work. Still, she looks ready for sex. She looks up for it. Even the drape of that translucent skin folding over her hips cannot distract from what appears to be arousal.