by Irma Gold
Review of Australian Fiction, 14:1
Volume Fourteen: Issue One
Irma Gold & Matthia Dempsey
Zutiste, Inc.
Review of Australian Fiction, 14:1 Copyright © 2015 by Authors.
Contents
Imprint
No Story Irma Gold
Saudade Matthia Dempsey
Published by Review of Australian Fiction
“No Story” Copyright © 2015 by Irma Gold
“Saudade” Copyright © 2015 by Matthia Dempsey
www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com
No Story
Irma Gold
The day Geoffrey Buesnel finds the dead baby begins with a disagreement. His daughter has lately taken to employing various means by which to extract money from him on a daily basis. On this occasion the activity in question is dinner, followed by a movie.
‘It’s six days until pay day,’ Geoffrey says. ‘I can’t afford it.’
‘But everyone’s going,’ Esther pouts, the same way she did when she was small, swivelling the ball of her right foot back and forth.
‘What happened to that job? At McDonalds? Didn’t you get an interview?’
‘It’s super tough at the moment, Daddy. They had, like, thirty people apply.’
‘Listen,’ he says, knowing she won’t. ‘You need to be more proactive. Hand your CV out everywhere.’
‘I will, Daddy. Promise.’
It’s clear she knows they are on the home straight now.
He’s too old for all this. He sighs, opens his wallet and pulls out a couple of twenties.
‘Just this once,’ he says. ‘Get a job, all right?’
Her eyes shine. ‘Promise.’
She kisses him on the cheek.
He’s been played, again. It isn’t hard these days.
In the kitchen he opens the pantry and removes the pill dispenser that he organises on Sunday nights for the coming week. He opens the compartment that says FRI a.m. and tips out its contents. Sitting at the kitchen table with a lukewarm glass of water and lemon juice—to help the lymphatic system—he swallows them one by one. Nine in all. He isn’t sure if they are working. He is stressed about the cost of the medications that are supposed to be easing his stress. Once, he might have laughed.
‘Off now,’ Esther calls from the other side of the house. ‘I’ll go back to Kate’s place after school. Get changed there.’
‘All right,’ he calls back, forcing an upbeat note. ‘Have a good time. Be safe.’
He is glad he can’t see her eyes roll.
He hears the door slam. The silence vibrates in its wake. He stands at the kitchen sink and tries to remember where the juicer is stored. The naturopath has recommended fresh juices every morning. Apparently they are cleansing. Apparently he needs cleansing. Verushka would know where it lives, he thinks, slamming a cupboard door so hard it bounces open again. He kicks it closed.
Tonight while Esther is out he will worry. Won’t breathe easy until she returns. He’ll stay up on the pretext of reading a book, just to hear her shuck in through the door. Marj, their next-door neighbour, tells him it never ends. Her son is thirty-seven and still she worries. He has a wife, but no kids yet. Fertility problems. He spends half the year in Egypt, which doesn’t help. Nightly, Marj dreams about nail bombings and public executions and kidnappings. Her son claims this is all nonsense.
‘But I’m not bloody stupid,’ Marj tells Geoffrey. ‘I google the shit out of that place.’
Of a Sunday afternoon they sit on Marj’s verandah in matching deck chairs and catalogue their fears. Geoffrey’s (in no particular order) are:
1) Death by drug overdose. (He doesn’t know if Esther has tried drugs but a few months ago a girl died taking her first E. He clipped the article and left it on Esther’s desk. There is also the possibility that her drink might be spiked. This could lead to 2.)
2) (He doesn’t even want to think about that.)
3) (When, say, she is walking home alone from a party late at night. He has warned her against this, told her he’ll pick her up anywhere, anytime. But teenagers are stupid. They think they’re invincible. Yet look at what happened in Ohio. Girls older than Esther swiped from the street, imprisoned by that sicko for years. Castrol his name was. Or Castro maybe. Something like that. Castrate would have been more appropriate. But he isn’t the only one. There are plenty of collectors out there. He gave Esther that book, The Collector, as a warning, but she only read twenty pages or so. Said, It’s so boring, Dad. Totes not my thing.)
4) (Sometimes he sees an alleyway, a teenage youth, a Swiss army knife at Esther’s neck. He doesn’t know why it is that particular kind of knife. It could be a gun, or knuckle dusters—wasn’t that what the kids were into these days? All those martial arts movies giving them ideas.)
5) Alcohol poisoning. (Would her friends get her to the hospital, or would they leave her passed out in a gutter, which might then lead to 2, 3 or 4.)
6) Any number of other random possibilities. (Mostly they come to him at three am. If he doesn’t take a sleeping pill, scenes play out in his mind on loop until dawn rescues him.)
After Geoffrey and Marj have scrolled through their lists, they fuck. When Geoffrey thinks about this thing they have, he uses this word deliberately. It is mutual need, nothing more. Sometimes one of them will cry, and the other pretends not to see.
From his bathroom he can see over the fence and into a slice of Marj’s lounge. She can’t see him for the tinted glass, but while brushing his teeth Geoffrey can enjoy the view of her drinking a cup of tea or reading one of those cheap romance paperbacks she favours. She’s nothing like Verushka. Her hair is cut like a boy’s, undyed and full of grey. Her clothes are ultra casual, without style and thrown together as if to emphasise this fact. And yet she is attractive in a way Verushka never was. Raw and sexy and unexpected.
This morning her curtains are still drawn and teeth brushing assumes its regular tedium. The day is wide open before him, but the thought does not fill him with pleasure. It is his day off, his negotiated Mental Health Day. People use that phrase like it’s a joke. ‘Just reaaaaaaally needed a Mental Health Day,’ one of his colleagues had confessed recently, laughing. ‘Got a pedicure, had lunch at that new place Ian from Accounts was telling us about—remember? The one with the fuck-off fish tank—and watched old Offspring eps. Mental health restored!’
But Geoffrey’s Fridays aren’t an excuse for a sickie.
Geoffrey steps onto the verandah and pulls a cigarette packet from his shirt pocket. Slots a smoke between his lips but doesn’t light it. The day is bright and clear, he can see all the way to the harbour. Wind ruffles the garden, like a mother’s hand in her child’s hair.
He heads for the beach, avoiding stepping on any cracks in the pavement. One block across, a coughing fit cripples him. He bends over, hands pressed into his knees. Finishes by hoicking up a chunk of phlegm. It lands, black and evil-looking, on a dandelion plant.
By the time he reaches the grassed area that fronts the beach Geoffrey is out of breath. And the cigarette end is soggy. He tosses it at a bin and pretends that he doesn’t see it hit the rim and fall to the ground. It has been six days since he quit.
The first couple of days he had a crushing headache, could do nothing but lie in bed, even though the pillow was a jagged rock. Now it’s retreated to a dull ache, an ingratiating and unwelcome friend that follows him everywhere. He finds that a walk along the beach in the bracing wind clears his head a little.
Being a weekday there is only one other solitary walker, accompanied by an arthritic dog. It hauls itself in and out o
f the ocean in pursuit of a bent stick.
Geoffrey walks in the opposite direction, close to the water’s edge where the sand is firmer. He tries not to focus on his feet, to instead breathe in the expansiveness of water and sky, to let it take the jumpiness in his chest away. The truth is it can’t. His GP tells him this thing in his chest is one symptom of a generalised anxiety disorder. Translation: his wife’s run off with another bloke and left him a mess. He’s tried yoga, too, but that just made him feel like a fool.
He walks for maybe twenty minutes before his rattling lungs force him to rest. He heads up the beach to the dunes. Lying down into the scooped out sand, the wind evaporates, as if he’s been cling-wrapped in.
Turning his head, he notices an ash-coloured shell protruding from the dune. When Esther was small, most weekends they scoured the beach for shells. They would work for an hour or more until her bucket was full. Her favourites were tiny, coloured spirals, no bigger than her pinkie fingernail. She always had great plans to make necklaces and mosaics with them, but once home they were forgotten, left stinking in plastic bags until Verushka threw them out, only to be replaced with a new batch.
Geoffrey absently reaches forward to pluck up the shell now, but as his fingers make contact he recoils, stands abruptly and staggers backwards. Brushes his hand violently against his trouser leg. He tips his head to the sky, taking his vision as far away as possible. Clouds rapidly push sideways. The wind bumps his face, but only his fingertips feel conscious, tingling with knowledge. The shell was rubbery. Even as he looks at the sky he sees it, knows exactly what it is.
Forcing himself to step forward, he bends at the waist and examines it. He can’t believe he thought it was a shell, so obvious is it now. He straightens and looks around, as if expecting the person responsible to loom up before him. The beach is empty, the lone walker from earlier gone.
Geoffrey pulls his phone from his pocket. One bar of reception. The first person he thinks to phone is Verushka. Ridiculous, when she’s in Italy. Pure force of habit, he tells himself.
He staggers over the rise, holding his phone in front of him like a torch. Two bars now. Enough for the call.
‘It’s Geoffrey. Geoffrey Buesnel,’ he says when they put him through to the police, as if his name will mean something to them. ‘I’ve found a baby on the beach. A dead baby. Well, just a foot really. It’s buried.’
His heart lurches, as if he’s the one who’s committed the crime.
The female voice on the other end of the line calmly leads him through a series of questions. The location, the time of discovery, a description of the body. She actually says corpse. She is just asking him about other witnesses when the line goes dead. No bars.
He is filled with an urgent desire to run. And he does, conscious of how ridiculous he must look. An old man flailing up the beach, scuffing sand into his shoes, the sound of his own breath pounding in his ears.
In the car park, he sinks to his haunches, clutches at his chest, coughs as if he’s trying to force his insides out.
‘You right, mate?’
It’s a young bloke, board under his arm.
Geoffrey nods. ‘Wouldn’t go down there though,’ he wheezes. ‘At least not in the dunes.’
‘Oh,’ the boy says. ‘How come?’
Geoffrey draws a breath deep into his guts, tries to even himself out. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a light?’
‘In the car,’ the boy jerks his head in the direction of a ute. ‘Hang on.’
Geoffrey checks his phone. Three bars. He does something he’s never done before. He gets Marj’s number from the White Pages online, and phones her.
The boy returns while he is explaining the situation in a series of dot points. He sees the fist holding the lighter twitch.
‘You heard, then,’ Geoffrey says when he’s hung up.
‘Fuuuuck,’ is all the boy says.
Geoffrey takes the lighter and cups his hands around a cigarette. He hadn’t realised they were shaking until now. He sucks hard, holds the smoke in. For a moment he experiences a kind of heady bliss.
‘What should we do?’ the boy asks. He looks suddenly younger, a mere child. It strips Geoffrey of his own jitters.
‘Wait. That’s all we can do. Police are on their way.’
‘Right,’ the boy says. ‘Right then.’
By the time Marj arrives the police have already hammered in stakes and cordoned off the area with blue and white chequered tape and orange cones. There are at least ten of them, some using spades, and a German shepherd sniffing the place over. A blue tent is being erected over the spot where, less than half an hour before, Geoffrey was lying thinking of Esther.
Marj hands him a plastic cup and pours a thin stream of thermos coffee.
‘Could have done with something stronger,’ he says, a faint mocking smile on his lips.
‘Gotta keep your wits about ya.’
In the morning light her eyes are shockingly blue, the irises tiny pinpoints. Geoffrey has an overwhelming need to feel her naked body on top of him, the weight of her, the texture of her skin.
He turns away from her, looks out across the ocean. On the horizon a ship catches the sunlight, its belly gleaming a brilliant red. It inches along. Serene, oblivious.
He wonders if at this precise moment Verushka is on the other side of the world watching a boat, a gondola perhaps. Though of course this is impossible, her being by the seaside in Stabiae, not Venice. So perhaps she is also watching a container ship creep across the horizon. Either way he resents that he is here, dealing with so much that he didn’t ask for, and she is there, free to drink shots of grappa and eat authentic Neapolitan pizza and potter about the piazzas, or whatever they fuck they do in Italy. He wouldn’t know. He’s only spent ten thousand hours researching the place.
They’d first bonded over Italy. Neither of them had ever been; they both longed to. During the early years of their marriage they planned their trip often. What was always known was this: they would take several months, wind languorously from Milan to the tip of Italy’s high-heeled boot. But the small details of their imagined itinerary shifted, were refined with every telling. With Verushka being an architect, it was clear they would visit the Villa La Rotonda and the Ponte Vecchio and the Pantheon (not to be confused with the Parthenon in Greece, as Geoffrey himself had, much to Verushka’s disgust), and a whole lot of other buildings besides. But other places that caught their eye for any number of reasons were added. Prehistoric cave dwellings in Matera. Painted house facades in Pordenone. A restaurant in a tiny village in northern Puglia where Geoffrey’s cousin claimed she had eaten the best meal of her life. And so it went.
Then Esther came along and for some years talk of Italy stopped. Once Esther was at school Verushka would occasionally suggest that when Esther was old enough to be left, perhaps they might take two weeks. Do a condensed, manic version and save the languid one for their retirement. But her ideas about what was old enough kept shifting.
And now of course it was clear. It would never be. At least not for Geoffrey. Verushka, on the other hand, could be as languid as she liked, living as she was in an ancient Roman town just south of Pompeii, with a man nine years her junior. A man twenty-eight years Geoffrey’s junior. A man who was in his final year of high school the year Esther was born.
Sometimes Geoffrey dreams of Mount Vesuvius erupting and suffocating Stabiae in metres of thick ash, just as it did in 79 AD. He imagines excavating his wife’s villa (for technically she is still his wife) and discovering their bodies, twisted together on the bed. Aldo’s head arched, his mouth opened wide, lips pulled back like a braying donkey. Verushka’s head buried in her lover’s chest, arms bent around her ears. Geoffrey can’t see her face. And no matter how hard he tries to remove the ash, the lovers are fused together. Verushka’s face, her last thoughts, remain unknowable.
Geoffrey rubs at his upper arms. Three men with clipboards are arriving now. Picking their way across the sand in
suits and black dress shoes. Marj and Geoffrey watch them advance on the tent in silence.
There is a crowd gathering, a straggle of stickybeaks. News has apparently got out. A woman with greasy hair and a kid on her hip barrels up beside them.
‘What’s going on?’ she says. ‘What’s happened?’
Marj opens her mouth to speak but Geoffrey shrugs. ‘Not sure,’ he says, not really lying.
The boy on her hip starts to whimper. ‘My bum’s got a tummy ache.’
‘Can’t you hang on a minute?’ she says to him. ‘We just got here.’
‘Nooooooooo,’ he wails. ‘My bum’s gonna explode.’
She rolls her eyes at Marj and Geoffrey. ‘I asked him not ten minutes ago if he needed to go. And you said no, didn’t you?’ she turns on the boy. ‘Remember? Remember that?’
The boy reaches behind him and clutches at one bum cheek. ‘Quickquickquickquickquick.’
‘Let us know if you hear anything,’ she says over her departing shoulder. ‘Won’t be a sec.’
Geoffrey ignores her but Marj nods with a thin-lipped smile.
As they watch her tramp up the rise, a cameraman arrives like an apparition, boom boy in tow, and behind them a young lass dressed in a skirt suit wholly unfit for the beach. Couldn’t be much older than Esther, her lipstick a strident shade of pink.
‘Christ,’ Geoffrey says. ‘Let’s go.’
‘You allowed?’
‘It’s not like I did it,’ he snarls. ‘Anyway, they’ve got my details. Come on.’
Marj pours them both a port and they sit on the couch, the television supplying background noise. The port is sickly sweet but Geoffrey swallows the stuff quickly.
‘Poor little mite,’ Marj says. ‘Bein dumped like that. Makes you wonder.’
‘About what?’
