Wintering

by Krissy Kneen

  Matthew. His eyes staring at her, hungry as he had been hungry ever since he returned. She held his head between her hands and kissed him. His tongue lapping at the underside of her teeth, his hands finding her buttocks and clinging there. His penis, smaller than William’s (impossible to not compare), pressing against her and she pushed her skirt up over her hips and stepped onto him. He stumbled back, finding balance with his back to the wall, more earthbound than before. More immediate. She pushed him down till he was sitting on the floor and climbed onto his lap. Until this moment he had not seemed real to her, not quite. He was inside her now, thrusting up into her, and now, finally, she knew that he was back.

  But it was a struggle. Him wrestling with her, turning her, flipping her body over and mounting her. Her push and shift to roll beneath him, thrusting up at him, dominant in her position beneath. They shifted and turned, rolled, found their feet, tore into each other. Afterwards she would find three large scratches on her thigh that he must have made. He would be similarly marked: her teeth on his shoulder. In his diminished state they were physically matched.

  Again, the difference between one man and the other, this gnashing, threatening pleasure. She rolled on top of him one last time and held him there with one hand, pleasuring herself with the other. She came, her back snapping to a taut curve, her eyes squeezing shut. Then, before the contractions had finished, he had lifted and turned her and pushed inside her from behind, coming to his own climax, shuddering and grunting, and that smell, turned earth and wild places, exuding from his skin as he collapsed onto her sweating back.

  He was up and off her in a second and she stayed for a while, facedown on the cold tiled floor, beginning to shiver as the moisture turned chill on her skin. She stood shakily and stripped off her shirt; wiped the damp floor with it. Towelled herself down and threw everything into the washing basket. Another load to do now. More mess to clean. She felt sore and bruised. She sat on the toilet and watched the machine pause, change direction, turn anticlockwise. The same red sock, still going around. She heard the sliding door open, no sound of it closing. Matthew would be gone.

  She wanted to talk to William. A terrible need eating at her, a betrayal. She checked her phone. A dozen unanswered calls to him. No point in calling again.

  She lay down on the couch by the fire and closed her eyes.

  Blood. She was drowning in blood. She couldn’t breathe—

  Then she opened her eyes and it was dark and there was someone on her and she still couldn’t breathe. There was an arm pushing her neck down. She tried to shrug it off, but she couldn’t. She felt her underpants tugged down. She felt him enter her like that. Again. Too soon, and without warning.

  Matthew. She closed her eyes. He was grunting above her. Not sex, this humping, not like anything else she had experienced. She was dry and it hurt and for some reason all she could think of was that time he took his plate and threw it at the wall, the green smear of pesto on the white paint. Then the other time, the grit of sand as she wiped her fingers across the laptop screen, the night she would not let herself go back to, she couldn’t go there, she couldn’t think about any of it, and as the nausea came she tried to breathe through the pressure on her chest. She made herself go slack-limbed. She endured. He humped.

  And then he grunted and came and slipped off her and there were footsteps and the sound of the screen door opening and the rattle of the stairs. Was this how it would be now?

  She rolled over. The fire was still alight. It was warm but there was an icy chill coming in from the beach. She stood. Her knees threatened to buckle, but she remained upright although her legs shook. She took a few tentative steps towards the door; shut it. Locked it.

  She would keep it locked. It was terrible, but he would have to knock now, begging to be let into his own house. She was horrible. What kind of a girlfriend would do this?

  She hesitated, but she left the door latched.

  There was still just the faintest discolouration on the wall. Jessica remembered how vivid the green had been, the violence of the shade.

  She sat at her desk. Touched the laptop screen: the metal was slightly warm. Her fingers rubbed at a spot on the screen, recalling the grit of sand. She let herself remember. She had pushed the memory down so hard she thought it had been erased. But it was all still there. She felt the action of pressing save, that most familiar of repeated gestures.

  She’d been hitting save as she heard his car pull up in front of the shack that night.

  She’d been so sick of it, she remembered. She’d spent all day changing commas to semicolons, then she misread the formatting for her reference section and it was all over the damn place. She’d stood, leaving the laptop open at the offending page, and gone to the stove to put the kettle on.

  Matthew.

  Matthew was home from work and he would want a cup of tea, hot and sweet. It was still early but it was almost dark already. Winter on the way.

  ‘Heya.’ His usual welcoming call.

  ‘Hi, love.’ Her habitual response. ‘You want a slice of date loaf with your tea?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ His voice was muffled. He was out front, in the toilet. Coldest room in the shack. In the lounge room the fire was roaring. Pea and ham-hock soup bubbling on the stove. He had cooked the soup, of course, but at least she had thought to defrost it in good time.

  She took the date loaf out of the fridge. He’d baked it on the weekend. A man who baked and cooked all her meals, and cleaned the house. Only a couple of slices left. She would learn to make date loaf, save him some time. He did so much for her and what did she ever do for him? Or banana bread, that was easy; she had made it once at university. Although you couldn’t always get bananas down here.

  She heard him in the lounge room, his big sandy boots, the shuffling of papers as he made a place for himself to sit down. Her papers were all over the couch, too late to race in and tidy them away now. Her mother definitely would not approve, but it wasn’t for long—only a few weeks till her deadline for submission. And this time she wouldn’t hesitate.

  Are you really ready to submit? Is it the best it can be?

  Matthew always asked her this. Four years past the end of her scholarship, and every time she thought the thesis was ready to submit he would touch her shoulder with a gentle hand and gaze at her with soft puppy eyes and ask: Are you sure? Is it the best it can be?

  It would never be right, though. It would never be the best. She just wasn’t that good. Time to admit it and give in. Her supervisor said it was now or never; she had run out of last chances. It was time.

  And she would clean up when it was over. She would bake and make dinners and freeze them and clean the lounge room and make the bed…

  The kettle whistled so she lifted it onto the bench and turned the stove off. The stove was from the sixties, a relic. She had repeatedly asked Matthew’s mother if she could replace it and was always met with silence. Maybe when she had finished her studies she would just do it: order a new one and move the old one under the shack. She’d ask Matthew about it next week.

  Everything on hold now till she pressed send.

  She poured the tea, turned, spilled a little, startled by his body blocking the entry to the kitchen. Looming, still and silent. He was staring at her.

  ‘Jesus. Matthew,’ she said, feeling her heart pounding in her chest.

  ‘What were you doing this Saturday, again?’ His voice was quiet and low. She didn’t like the sound of it.

  She squinted. What had she done? Something. She had done something wrong.

  The hot cup was burning her fingers; she shifted her grip. She needed to put it down on the table but here he was, blocking her path.

  Saturday. She had no idea what he meant. What was happening Saturday? What had she done this time? She was hopeless, distracted. Did she have a supervision meeting booked in? Surely not—not this close to submitting.

  She could smell the sudden sweat pooling in her armpits. Her cheek
s were pinking. She looked guilty. She was guilty but she wasn’t sure exactly what of. Whatever it was, she was sorry already. She was ready to apologise as soon as she remembered what she had done.

  ‘What are you doing on Saturday, Jessica?’

  She hesitated. She couldn’t meet his gaze. ‘Ah…referencing?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘try again.’

  ‘Re-reading my literature review?’

  ‘Saturday night, Jessica. Saturday night.’

  Her fingers were burning, the tea was too hot. She turned and dropped the cup in the sink. She shook her hands out.

  ‘I burned my fingers, Matthew.’

  ‘Someone’s birthday, maybe?’

  ‘What?’

  Then she remembered. She tried to push past him, but he stood his ground. She had to turn side on and press her back against the doorframe. Her computer was open. When she moved to look at the screen she saw a rain of multicoloured balloons bursting. You’re Invited! Then Gus’s name and address.

  ‘You opened my emails? You checked my emails?’

  ‘It was already open, babe.’

  But it wasn’t. She had just then stood up from her referencing. She clearly remembered placing a semicolon on the screen, deleting a comma, rubbing her eyes and hearing the car pull up in the drive. She hadn’t checked her emails for hours. In fact she had been running that program, Freedom, to block the internet. Matthew would have had to disable Freedom, turn the hotspot on from his phone, open her email and then the email from Gus. He had only just got home. He’d gone to the bathroom…

  She hadn’t heard him flush. Perhaps he’d had a few minutes alone with her computer.

  ‘That’s insane.’ She could hear the anger in her own voice. She could feel the rise of it, tight in her chest. ‘You went through my emails.’

  ‘Gus.’

  ‘You’re fucking insane!’

  He moved closer to her, too close. She could feel herself shrinking down to nothing.

  ‘Who’s Gus?’

  ‘You know who.’ But her voice—such a nothing thing, taking up no space at all.

  ‘What’s Gus to you?’

  ‘A friend. A work friend.’ But already her voice was more sob than sound.

  ‘Happy birthday to Gus.’

  ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘You’re not going, now?’

  ‘I never was! I’m not—’

  ‘Oh, now you’re not.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘’Cause you should go.’

  ‘I don’t…’

  ‘You should go to Gus. You should go now.’

  She saw his hand stretch out towards her laptop. She saw his fingers curl to grab it. Her thesis! She snatched at her thesis. That’s how she saw the laptop now, it was her thesis, nothing much else. She got her shifts emailed to her. She got some junk mail. She got her online subscriptions, Nature and New Scientist and Nautilus. She filed her own Science Weekly stories. She kept some research in a file for that, but mostly it was just her thesis. The only complete copy of her thesis.

  He had hold of it now and her fingers snatched but they slipped and then her thesis was in his hands. He snapped the laptop shut roughly and flicked his hand back, as if to keep it away, out of her reach.

  And then it slipped from his fingers—or he flung it or it flew of its own accord away from him—but whatever the reason it was airborne briefly and then the crack of it against the fibro wall and the shiver of the whole shack at the impact, the curl of her spine as she folded down over her womb. As if her thesis was an infant, protected inside her belly, and the sound of it cracking against the wall was a kick to her guts.

  All the air spilled out of her in a sharp hiss. She was suffocating as surely as if he had wrapped both his hands around her neck.

  She rushed to the child, the spilled baby, but he was there first and he held the laptop so easily above his head and out of her reach. She threw herself at him. She punched his chest with her fists and he laughed at her as if she were tapping him with her fingertips. She punched with all the force of her clenched fists and he moved then, grabbing her wrist tightly with one hand then turning and flinging, and the sliding back door was open—had she left it open? Was this her fault?—and the beach was in darkness beyond the back stairs and there was her laptop cartwheeling away from the light. A balletic arc of silver disappearing on the way to the water’s edge.

  A sound.

  Maybe it had come from her throat or maybe it was the sound of the hot water system finally exploding. She was on the stairs before she knew it, slipping, falling, pushing herself out of the acacia bush, slipping over the wall of rocks and lying facedown in the damp sand. She saw the glint of it and rolled towards it and snapped it up into her lap and only then knew that her ankle was twisted.

  A sharp pain shooting up her leg but she stood with the laptop clutched to her chest and limped away down the beach, past the summer shacks, all dark and shuttered. Past the boat tied to the tree trunk, past the pile of cray pots and the floats hanging from the neighbouring eaves. A shooting pain in her leg and she wasn’t wearing a coat at all. The cold was a thing she was pushing through like a field of sugarcane, like her childhood fears every time she ran away from the compound, determined that this time she’d make a break for it. She was aware of the cold as an obstacle: she leaned against it. She moved quickly through it over the damp sand and up towards the road.

  The road curved up a steep hill. She was halfway up it before she realised that she was on foot, walking away from the shack. Walking away, not walking towards. There was nothing to go towards at all. She reached the top of the hill and looked out over the ocean, the blink of the lighthouse on Bruny Island and beyond that…Nothing till you hit Antarctica.

  She thought about the ice melting. She thought about the sea level rising. She had filed a story about that just last week, but she couldn’t remember the stats. All she could think about was her thesis, the beautifully rendered tables, the lines of light generation, the circadian rising and falling as the glow-worms woke and slept again, setting up a rhythm that breathed steadily across the eight long years of her research.

  She was walking downhill, almost running. Her leg didn’t hurt so much now, just a bruise, not a sprain or a fracture. She walked on, past the jetty then away from it. There was someone on the jetty, someone fishing, probably. She didn’t stop to look. She walked away from it.

  The low, long building of the pub and local store was in front of her but she wasn’t walking towards that either. Then it was behind her. So she’d been walking for forty-five minutes: that was how long it took to walk to the shop for milk.

  Time was only relative to mass. The road disappearing behind her marked the hour. It was late. The lights of the pub shone brightly out towards five cars parked beside it. Slow night. The cars meant it was a weeknight.

  Time really is relative. She thought about how you might travel away from Earth at almost the speed of light and no time at all would pass as your loved ones aged and eventually died. She wondered if Matthew was still her loved one. But if not Matthew, who? There was only him, and if she loved no one then she might as well be out in space, shooting off at light speed, suspended in her haste to leave him behind.

  She hugged her laptop closer. Did she really love the thesis? Was it really like a child to her?

  She stopped. The pub was behind her now. She was at the turn: left to Ida Bay, four hours’ walk, and beyond that the caves where she worked. To her right was the cold, dense forest where even an SOS call could not penetrate the canopy.

  She had left her phone behind at the shack—with Matthew, her only loved one. She dropped to her knees at the crossroads, placed her laptop on the ground and hunched over to open it. The light spilled up onto her face. She held her breath for a moment and only exhaled when the screen reassembled itself into an image of falling balloons. Come to my party! She looked at Gus’s name; felt a wave of hatred. She hadn’t realised how
much she hated him till now. She should have said that to Matthew. She could have avoided all of this if she had just told him how visceral her hatred for Gus really was.

  She clicked out of the invitation, out of her email program. There was her thesis. It was still there safely on her screen. She hit save: multiple times, just in case. Scrolled back through the document, checking that everything was there, everything working, the beating heart of her life down here at the southernmost place in the country.

  She heard footsteps, and turned. It was a man. A thin, crooked man. There was some moon and in that light his face looked sallow. Sunlight reflected, she reminded herself. Weak reflected light from the sun. It made his face into a landscape of craters. It made him seem mean and threatening. She held her laptop close. To protect it, but also to hide her breasts.

  ‘You right?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘You’re Matthew’s woman.’

  Not a question, but it seemed like he was waiting for her to reply.

  ‘I’m just walking,’ she said.

  He looked at her laptop. He looked at her bare arms. He looked at her hidden breasts and at her legs in the cling of denim. He looked at her puffy red eyes and her bruised, slightly swollen lips. Had she fallen on her face? She couldn’t remember. Probably. She was so clumsy.

  He looked at her face for what seemed like a long time and then he reached for her. She flinched. He was holding her arm.

  ‘Come inside. You can use my phone.’

  Why would she want to use his phone? She noticed his house then. She had stopped right beside his gate. His lights were on. His door open. There was an axe in a log by the front door. There was a woodpile and a broken-down car, just a skeleton of rusted panels and spilled tyres. She could see his bare walls inside. No curtains, no paintings, nothing feminine. A house that belonged to a man alone.