We continue heading down the beach, the northerly wind at our backs. Harry looks back at the asbestos shacks bunched at the end of the bay.
‘No-one can see us,’ I say.
I drop the tackle bag in the sand and check my line and trace. Nothing is tangled.
‘Dad’s been better,’ I tell him. ‘Now that he’s working again.’
Harry doesn’t listen. I begin to rig Dad’s beach rod. I put the line in my mouth and moisten the knot, just how he showed us.
‘He’s different now, ever since—’
Harry brings his eyes from the sand. I can’t help but stare at the scar line poking above his shirt collar like a pink beach worm. He runs a finger across it, shiny and smooth like weathered glass.
When the rod is ready, I wade into the shallows and leave him at the shore with the tackle bag full of discarded tobacco packets and beer cans; mementos of our father and the long nights he’d spend casting his line below the lighthouse. I swing the heavy rod over my shoulder and leave it there for a moment, the lure dangling close to Harry’s face. He inspects it closely, counts the tiny painted gills before I haul it above the shore break.
He stands close. I can almost feel him there, feel his awkward lope; that stance that would put you off for the first two rounds before you worked out it was unintentional. He has the same look on his face he had in his first fight. He was scared then, but he shouldn’t have been. It was his right hook you had to look out for. It left a constant dent in the side of the heavy bag. I’d see it swinging silently from the corner of my eye when I went into the garage. It reminded me of what he could do if he ever decided to really let ‘em fly.
I survey his lips and they flinch like he’s going to say something but the mosquito buzz of my reel and the waves rushing around my legs are the only sounds between us. When my lure takes a hit I act like I don’t give a shit. I just wind in slowly and throw him a glance when the time is right, but I know that deep down in his bones he knows I’m shaking like a kicked mutt.
‘Not much happening,’ I say after a while.
Harry trudges back in to our stuff. I try to stay out there but my calves burn like I’ve just done six rounds on the rope. I finally give in and slump next to Harry in defeat and watch the green waves rearing up at the shore.
‘It’s not ya fault, Harry,’ I say. ‘You know, with Dad and everything.’
He toys with the sand and regards the sea.
‘Harry?’
Just the sight of his hands trembling in the afternoon light is enough to keep us both quiet. He eventually pulls his eyes from the horizon and I follow the sun etching itself into the lines of his white face. It makes him look old, too damn old for his age. The lagoon tinge beneath his eyes makes him seem weaker than he is. I’m tempted to drag him out of the light. He’s tougher than that. The flowers at his bedside always seemed so out of place. I’ve seen him on the cliff edge of giving in and even then he could send you packing with a single glance.
I start to shape a ball of wet sand with the rough parts of my hands. I bury it like a turtle egg and wait until it’s cooked, hard and ready.
‘Mum reckons it’s complicated.’
I don’t know why but I reach out to graze his now fragile fingers, just to stop them from sifting the earth between his legs. Dad said Harry had all the potential in the world when he was younger; long arms, lean. Said they’d never see him coming if he stuck at it. Said he could see he was a southpaw from the way Harry threw his jab. That was before they found out his heart wall was too thick on one side. Dad would always ruffle his hair and say it was just a bung ticker. Harry never laughed though. He’d say he was tired and the nurse would usher us into the hall. Then Mum would clip Dad across the ear with a rolled up magazine and tell him to go make her a coffee. Black and mean, she’d say, like Sonny Liston.
I brace myself for the now unfamiliar touch of his skin, the fridge door feel of his nails. I remember his knuckles wrapped in tea towels from the kitchen bottom drawer. He was only a kid but he opened me up, big time, and wanted to stop when he saw the claret. I made him keep going until the tea towels were flecked with busted brows and I held out until he was so exhausted I won by default.
They’re big knuckles for a kid, bony, gravel-shaped. I wonder how many teeth they would have dislodged if he stuck at it like Dad said. They’d never see it comin’.
He must feel my gaze, see my creeping mitts because suddenly he’s up, bounding for the bush behind the dune walls. I scramble after him, the sand ball bouncing in the sagging belly of my shirt. He stops on the ridge between the land and the sea and looks down at a flock of seagulls huddled against the wind. I climb the dune and stand beside him. He eyes the birds with devout concentration, a closeness that would perk a teacher’s ears up. He brings his hand towards his chest, an unknowing reflex since the first operation, and presses his sternum with his fingers. The gulls shiver the sand from their wings and my brother’s fingers dig into his shirt fabric until the cotton leaks blood. I tell him to stop. I tell him what he wants to hear, that Dad’s an old bastard, too old-fashioned. I tell him I should have tried harder, we all should have. His eyes burn like a fever and the birds watch us perched on the dune like we’re something more than bickering kids.
I take the sand ball out from the bottom of my shirt. Harry keeps prodding his chest like it’s made of canvas. Before I throw it, I see his grin; the same one he had when he was drawn to fight another out-of-towner in his first bout. I remember it being so sharp it could cut your soul in two. Dad and I watched from his corner as the bell rang. We knew it wasn’t going to last very long. We knew how Harry moved. Like a younger, leaner Sugar Robinson, the old man said. We held onto the ropes and got ready for an early ride home with the radio as loud as it could go. We were drunk with confidence, you’d almost call it cockiness but you had to be there.
Harry examines the blood between his fingertips. He never really had the guts for the ring. Couldn’t go for the throat when he needed to. He could run a mile in six minutes but it’s not a substitute for the nerves.
I take one last look at him; his shaking hands, that same smile that got him knocked cold, got him tasting the dirty canvas with his lips, and I lob the ball over my head. The dune grass whips at our ankles as we watch it falling through the sky like a giant sinker. We hold our breaths, tense our guts as the gulls lift in a cloud of scurrying wings until they’re just a mad white blur. Harry begins to laugh. I’m laughing too, cackling like a toddler and I don’t really know why.
Then we notice one left squabbling, its weight dragging in circles through the sand. My mouth feels like it’s full of shattered glass. I taste the fighter’s blood behind my teeth, the glove sweat stink coming from our skin. I leave Harry and sprint down to the harder sand where the bird shakes and squawks on its buckled wing. I pick it up and hold it under my shirt, hold it against my skin. I feel its silky feathers and the soft flurry and rhythm of heart and blood.
On the way home after the fight, we stopped by the local butcher and bought a hunk of wet meat for Harry’s eye. Dad talked in proverbs from the driver’s seat, about having heart, saving face. When I looked back at Harry, I knew that was it, I knew his gloves would be hung on the hook by the back door and never laced up again.
The swell is up, breaking unevenly and sending cold spray shoreward. I wade through the waves with the limp bird in the pit of my shirt. I stop at the edge of the sandbank where the water is dark and the land falls away. Where the world ends. I want to say something, to scream at god for everything, to tell him I’m sorry, we all are, but the words are stuck like shells between my toes. My hands tremble and the bird just stares. Dad never believed in god, because of Harry and the war and all that stuff, so I hold the bird and wait.
The tide starts to come in. The current drags around my knees. The waves begin to hit me in the belly and chest but I don’t move. The bird hovers above the rising water, quivering in my hand. The sea starts to creep up
and around my neck like one of Grandma’s knitted sweaters. She always knitted us jumpers while Harry was in the hospital. Just a bung ticker, my Dad would always say. It’s funny; the bird in my fist would be the same weight as a human heart. A heart drained of life and blood. A heart clogged with seawater. And now I’m under, my feet kicking free from the world below and it’s like he could still be here, Harry, dancing across the dunes, bobbing and weaving behind his household-famous jab.
Westerly
Vital Signs
Nicola Redhouse
Imminent death came to Alice in an unexpected place: the freezer section of the supermarket, with a twelve-pack of toilet rolls pinioned to her shoulder and an alfoil tray clutched under her left arm.
It came in the form of the return of a headache that she now realised had been there for two weeks – since the last time she had been in the freezer section. It radiated a pain that filled her cranium and sharpened when she lay down, felt as though there was something inside her head trying to move everything else out of the way. She should probably see the doctor.
The toilet rolls were slipping. She wasn’t prone to hypochondria, but it seemed, there in front of the party pies, like a storm was drawing in around her. The bags of peas and cartons of ice-cream took on a grey pallor in the fluorescent light.
And then, at once, the headache dulled. Perhaps it wasn’t fatal after all, she thought. She dumped everything into a trolley and pushed on to the confectionary aisle. Liquorice Allsorts were down, two bags for a dollar.
*
Dr Kline shone a light. ‘Follow the beam,’ he said.
The headache pulsed along with her heartbeat. ‘It’s better today,’ she told him, fearful suddenly that the source of the pain knew it was in the presence of a doctor and would withdraw.
He was not a talker. She imagined he could see her thought like a tiny pinball rattling around her head.
The doctor felt her neck, took her blood pressure, prodded around her ears, taking a look inside each. He palpated her cheeks and forehead.
‘Does this hurt?’ he asked. He was breathing through his nose.
She felt she should say yes.
‘No.’
It seemed an interminable wait while he took apart the otoscope, washed his hands and returned to his desk.
‘I can’t find anything,’ he announced. ‘But I’d like you to have an MRI, just as a precaution.’
The clock ticked as he wrote out a referral.
*
It was quiet in the car park, nothing but leaves whipping around into whirligigs. The headache had lifted again and she absorbed the peace left in its wake. She was aware, too, of the pendulous nature of her mind; that she could swing it towards rapidly unfolding tragedy – a tumour, hospice, the selection of music for her funeral – or towards a clear scan.
And, ridiculously, she was bothered by the inconvenience of it all – having to leave work early again; becoming embroiled in a discussion about illness with her boss, Janice. She’d wanted to avoid mentioning the headaches.
She sat in the car and phoned Frank, who seemed to take the doctor’s non-verdict as good news. ‘You just need a good sleep.’ Twenty years out of France and he still pronounced it slip.
The irritable feeling expanded, prickled her skin; she felt it like a burr underfoot. She phoned the hospital and booked the scan, then sat back and closed her eyes.
*
She became conscious of the thing with colour later that week: a tint settled over her vision, as though she was looking through a sheet of cellophane, and dissolved as quickly as it came.
The first time, down the side of the house while she took the bins out, she thought it must be the evening light – a gentle blue, almost opalescent. But then it happened again at her desk, citron this time, and she saw that the colour did not behave as though it came from a light source. It was dense. Consistent.
She made another appointment with Dr Kline.
This time, he didn’t bother with the physical examination.
‘Are you feeling anything when you see this colour? Are you smelling anything? Eating?’ he asked. There was a hint of excitement to his tone, Alice noted.
She gave the questions close consideration. ‘With the blue, I was in a rush – I’d left a curry on the stove,’ she paused. ‘The yellow … I was eating a chicken sandwich.’
She pondered the memory further. ‘My shoes were hurting me.’
‘A chicken sandwich.’ he repeated. He was on the edge of his chair. His leg was jiggling up and down.
‘It was delicious,’ she ventured.
He looked up at her over the edge of his bifocals.
‘It had dill in it, too.’ She felt a little like she was giving a police statement, both hopeful and idiotic.
‘And you weren’t eating when the blue colour came?’
She tried to recall. Dr Kline had the air of a tortoise about him. In anticipation of her answer she saw his face had become more human. Still, her answer was no. She had not been eating.
He scribbled in his notebook for some minutes, and when he finally looked up she saw he was his ancient reptilian self again. ‘Come and see me after the MRI, and call if you notice anything else.’
Something about having disappointed Dr Kline made her feel peculiarly edgy and, driving on the freeway towards home, agitation bloomed – she ground her teeth, tried to loosen her jaw, tasted something like metal. She turned the corner off Brunswick Street, and it dawned on her that their cream weatherboard was slightly green. That everything was green.
*
She decided not to tell Frank, who had been out in the garage all morning sanding down a bureau he’d bought on eBay. He’d have too much to say about the psychology of it all; probably tell her she needed to see a shrink again. She wanted to turn this idea around on her own for a while.
She turned on the computer and opened a spreadsheet, typed date in the first column, sensation in the second, and emotion in the third.
The empty document, its promise of filling up, of accumulating to an answer, excited her. She knew this sensation – it was the pleasure of deliberate reflection; a luxurious curating of the self. It had come to her in her twenties when she had kept a diary. She had been religious about it, amassed a boxful of youthful optimism.
It had petered off, the record-keeping, the two years they tried to have a baby, and stopped altogether the day they had at last been told it would never happen. Not in her womb, in any case.
It was better to engage, she had decided. Better to appreciate each moment as it happened, than to feel, while it was happening, that it was going to become inscribed, immutable.
The room had become a deep mauve. The colour moved through her like the low bass note of a cello.
She entered her first record of data.
*
Frank pushed through the front door, holding his key-ring between his teeth, hands laden with Indian takeaway.
The whole car would smell tomorrow, she thought. She had become so attuned to her feelings since she’d started the spreadsheet; it was like having a detective inside her mind.
They settled down in front of the television – a documentary about Iceland – and ate, a habit she often worried was a sign of stagnancy in their relationship. But, this night, with the rain streaming down the windows, and the strange lilting narration, she felt a love for Frank so powerful it had the vulnerability of a wound. She feared if she moved she would open up entirely.
Frank was her home. They had made it through childlessness, which she’d seen destroy other couples, and had determined a new future for themselves. It was a future without school plays and tree houses – or chickenpox and unidentifiable rashes, for that matter. But it had, she felt, comparatively unconstrained time. There were only their own slow years to pass by; no lives counted in weeks, months, words, teeth, height, report cards or shoe size, graduations, the chaos of it all sending the days into freefall.
A clear
white light had spilled in to the room, from the glaciers on TV, or from her mind – for once she didn’t care to know. She took his hand.
*
The scan was less frightening than she had anticipated. There was her initial claustrophobia – she had been unable to shake a memory of Janice, years ago, likening it to being buried alive. And for a while she felt slightly queasy, imagining radio frequencies invisibly searching out her body, the thought of what they might come upon.
But then she seemed to give way, to find the limitations of the capsule comforting. The blankets and the padding, the cocoon of white plastic that both contained her vision and offered an endless horizon. Only the intermittent buzzing and strange knocks filtering through the earplugs offered a distant reminder of the context of her reverie.
Lying in that strange empty space, she tried to remember back to when she had met Frank. She was three years in to a law degree and had taken a semester out to travel, feeling increasingly certain that she did not want to be a lawyer.
Her choice of study had been born of a romantic notion that the law was a high form of the arts – a realm of the classics in which she would be most deeply engaged with stories, tragedies. But she had found it to be deviously mathematical. Logic minus hope: a world in which intention was flawlessly calculable.
She spent hours in the library, lost in the detail of tort cases: the story of the men who had lured their victim to a hut, gotten him drunk and knocked him unconscious, then thrown him off a cliff, believing him dead – What had they drunk? What had they talked about? She’d wondered. But in the end all the tutor had wanted was the precise principal on which the case was decided. Ratio decidendi: the Latin turned the events into an object. It was an alchemy of joylessness, a puzzle whose un-coding reminded her of the childhood feeling of trying to discern if her father’s temper was connected to her.
She had much preferred her Arts classes: analysing literature, feeling that she had the power as a reader to make a story what she wished. It was a philosophy class that had nudged her over the edge about the law degree, made her see that it was ludicrous, punitive even, to ask for a single narrative truth from anything.
The Best Australian Stories 2015 Page 19
