Tremble

by Tobsha Learner

  As if on cue a pager bleeped somewhere in the room. Saturday reached into the desk drawer and pulled out a mobile phone that looked as if it had been designed in the last century. She glanced at it. “There you go, that’s the ex now.”

  She thrust the mobile at Gavin. Mercury in retrograde, your Taurean moon is under threat, can I come around tonight? Scorpio rising x ran across the screen.

  “Scorpio rising! It always is with him!” Saturday broke into another of her throaty chuckles. Gavin winced, the memory of his own impotency looming uncomfortably.

  “Bloody idiot can’t do a thing without checking the charts. Fucking voodoo. I threw him out last week; he has no scientific discipline whatsoever. Text back an emphatic No, will you?”

  Obeying, Gavin rejected the botanist’s anxious suitor but, taking pity, used only one exclamation mark.

  Saturday finally settled on an image, the screen darkening as a speedup evolution thickened the landscape. “Have a look at this,” she murmured. Gavin moved closer, surprised at how vivid the colors were on the screen.

  The primordial forest had a heavy canopy and minimal sun filtered through to the forest floor, which was alive with primitive-looking ferns and vines.

  “There’s your Jambadostrobus.” Saturday moved the mouse so an arrow pointed to a tall pinelike tree. “It would fruit only at the top—impressive, eh? Like that leaf of yours producing seed pods attached to each individual leaf.”

  Gavin peered at the screen; the thick foliage made him shiver. There was something obscene about the abundance of spiraling vegetation tumbling and curling over itself in an attempt to secure more light. It was familiar, but it was not the landscape he’d been plunged into.

  “How would the forest sound if I was standing in it?” he asked, praying he didn’t sound too crazy.

  “You wouldn’t be. There weren’t any humans, at least not as we know them, at this time. Just shrewlike mammals that were probably tree dwellers.”

  “What about the theropods?” he persisted. A slow blush crept up from his collar as he remembered the footprints, their steamy outline evaporating slowly in his mind’s eye. His fingers closed on a fossil that sat on the desk. Saturday firmly took the rock away from him. The property developer was looking increasingly distraught; one knee jerked involuntarily and there was a stretched look to his face that Saturday had initially thought was stress but now recognized as fear. Interesting, she thought, making a mental note, hallucinations involve misplaced delusions of grandeur.

  “Nasty flesh-eating buggers that scampered across the forest floor,” she said aloud. “You wouldn’t want to meet one on a dark windy night. As for the sound, who knows? Looking at that canopy, you’re not going to get a great deal of rustling, certainly not a roar, unless you’re perched right at the top or hovering above. If anything there would probably have been an eerie silence below.”

  “Then that’s not it!” Gavin, exasperated, stood up and began striding around the room, running his fingers through his hair over and over as he fought the sense of vertigo that failure brought.

  “It looks wrong. There are elements, but it’s not right, I know it!”

  “But it’s a beginning, Gav.” Watching his fallen face and the way one of his eyebrows was twitching from nerves, she couldn’t help but take pity. “Don’t be so male about this. This isn’t one of those linear problems you can solve just like that; you have to take a holistic approach. It’s like a prism, something to be understood from many angles simultaneously. We know one thing: it’s a forest, a landscape, that is haunting you, right?”

  Gavin nodded like a little boy, his hair standing up in tufts. Finding it difficult to breathe he loosened his tie and undid his top button. He hadn’t been so disheveled in years.

  “Now we just have to locate where it is and when,” Saturday continued, wondering whether she shouldn’t be recording the conversation.

  “You believe me, don’t you?” Gavin whispered, crumpling into a beanbag in the corner.

  “Put it this way, Gav—I believe in Gaia, in Goddess Earth as a living organism, and frankly if she were going to pick on anyone, it would be you.”

  Stepping off the back porch, the property developer followed Saturday through the plethora of ferns, feral gardenia bushes, flowering gums, and fountains of reeds, his eyes drawn to her great arse wobbling in front of him. The air was thick with jasmine and the fruity smell of freshly turned earth. The paleobotanist reached a small clearing, a band of luminous green in the overgrowth. She bent and tore a flowering branch off a low bush.

  “Here, take this—sage. Smoke your apartment, smoke your office, smoke your fucking Merc—it might help ward off any more visitations, you never know.”

  Dubiously Gavin took the offered herbs. He held them at a distance, acutely allergic to flowering plants. “Thank you,” he said, his voice already turning nasal before he sneezed violently.

  As they picked their way back around the side of the house a craggy stone head suddenly loomed up at him. It was the face of a man, entirely covered by the leaves of a tree that seemed to be growing out of the center of his face, branching out just above the bridge of his nose. Startled, Gavin leaped back.

  Saturday grinned, taking a secret delight in the property developer’s terror. Now he knows how it is to be bullied, she thought.

  “Isn’t he magnificent? The original stands in Bamberg Cathedral. Thirteenth century, you know, a hangover from the pagan worship of the Green Man.”

  “The Green Man?”

  “The Celtic god of Nature.”

  Gavin stared at the face. The darkened eyes, fringed by the curved edges of the leaves like winged eyebrows, glared out in accusation and terrified him. And the more Gavin stared, the less he was able to shake the sensation that somehow he knew the man.

  “Is that what you think, that I’m being persecuted for my sins?” he asked, the formal wording of his question strangely appropriate for the Gothic atmosphere that pervaded the house and its surrounds.

  “Hey, I’m an agnostic, a floating voter. But one thing I do know is that an observed particle will behave in a certain way because it is being observed. In other words, if you believe in something it exists—and fear can only empower it,” she finished, embellishing her words with an ominous tone. As if affirming her statement, a pear suddenly dropped from the tree to the ground.

  His wife stood at the living room window. She was wearing a dress he recognized from the summer holiday they’d taken a year ago. He remembered the crisp smell of starch rising up from the linen mixed in with the scent of her suntan oil. Gavin had wanted her then. But, smiling softly, she had removed his hands from her body, a gesture that had sliced through his heart. However, he’d shrugged it off blithely, bellowing for his children to join him for a swim.

  There they were now: Aden had grown since the last time he’d seen him; the shadow of manhood pushing out his wrists and making jerky his loping strides. His daughter, Irene, sat on the kitchen counter swinging her legs. My baby, Gavin thought, remembering the moment the obstetrician had handed him the crumpled girl-child, her alien sex twinkling up at him as he gazed at her in stilled amazement.

  He rested his head against the steering wheel. He was parked across the road, the car thinly concealed by the row of trees in the front garden. His daughter looked so determined, sitting there. That one’s got my drive, he thought, every muscle contracting with longing. Just then the four-year-old was lifted into view as his brother swung him up playfully. Would they ever forgive him? Did they even really know him? he speculated, remembering all the times he’d worked late, all the times he’d been absent even in their presence, the flurry of mobile calls, the constant distraction of ambition burning up his attention. What had all that useless activity led to—this moment of complete solitude? Burying his head farther into his folded arms he wondered whether the holidays they’d spent together, the gifts of guilt he’d lavished upon them, had secured their love. Doubts sprang u
p and twisted into themselves. What was he becoming? Something he’d always feared: his father, his broken father.

  He started up the car and accelerated away from the curb. Inside the house Cathy caught a streak of ruby as the Merc passed. Pursing her lips she pulled the blinds shut.

  Was he rewriting history already, Gavin wondered as he sped through the streets of Fortitude Valley. Was that what loss was—a remapping of memory? An attempt to imbue the banal with meaning? Would he ever rid himself of the insidious sensation that he was constantly living in the past tense? Would he ever return to living in the moment instead of mourning what was gone and, more importantly, had perhaps never been?

  Furious with the deluge of self-indulgence he moved into fifth gear and watched the speedometer notch up to a hundred and ten. If he drove fast enough could he burn out this haunting, revert to the secure successful man he was before?

  The sudden scream of a police siren jolted him out of his reverie.

  The razor ran up the side of his thigh, black hair and shaving foam building up under the blade. Gavin washed it clean under the running tap. Dispassionately he watched the last of his body hair spiral down through the steel grid of the plug hole. It had taken him four hours to remove the hair from his chest, his shoulders, his legs, arse, and toes. His testicles he’d shaved, then used some cold-wax strips Amanda had left in the bathroom cabinet to pull out the last vestiges of stubble. Now they hung a little forlornly, unrecognizable in their shiny chicken-skin nudity. But the cleansing had been worth it. Gavin felt new, strong, and strangely innocent, which was exactly his intention. Now nothing could invade his mind or his body.

  He was going to drive the demon from his life. The shaving was part of it—an act of purification to ritualize the smoking of his apartment. It had seemed the only solution.

  He stood in the bathroom stark naked except for the wavy gray hair on his head. Apart from the rawness of his shaved flesh he looked remarkably unchanged, there was no indication of the turmoil going on under the skin. In wonder he placed his hand on the mirror, over his reflected chest. When he pulled away the imprint left on the glass was of a three-pronged claw.

  Gavin vomited violently into the toilet. His legs trembled uncontrollably as bile ripped from the base of his gut. He felt like weeping. Moving slowly he stepped into the waiting bath.

  The hot water was immediately comforting. He lowered himself down until his head was covered. Underneath, all was a muted echo, a world of dull thuds and the thumping of his heart against his eardrum. Then it started…a thin whistle that slithered over all other sounds, increasing slowly in volume. Go away, he prayed, his lungs squeezing through lack of oxygen. Go away. But despite his prayers the rustling grew louder.

  He opened his eyes underwater: a dull greenish light filtered in from above—the canopy of a forest. A dark figure stared down at him from beneath matted hair. Terrified, Gavin sat up bolt upright, water streaming down his face and chest. The bathroom was quiet, pristine, completely normal. Gavin got out, his heart racing, and pulled the plug violently. As the bathwater drained away it left behind a sheen of green algae.

  He’d had the smoke detectors turned off. The last thing he needed after being booked for speeding was the police turning up to find a well-known property developer striding around his own apartment minus body hair stark naked and clutching a bush of burning sage. Jesus Christ, he thought, what was he becoming?

  Shivering slightly, he bound the branches of the sage tightly with wire, then held the bundle over the gas flame of the stove. They flared instantly. Gavin pulled them away and blew the flame out. Sure enough the bush began to smoke as the embers ate their way down the stems.

  Holding the bush high he went to the main fuse box and switched off all the lights. Now the apartment was illuminated only by the amber glow of the smoldering plants and the city lights outside. Gavin walked slowly around, waving the bush carefully to make sure the billowing smoke filled all corners of the apartment.

  In the office block opposite the cleaner switched off her vacuum cleaner and watched in amazement as the man she had taken to fantasizing about walked gracefully through the flat opposite, his skin illuminated a soft pink from the burning torch he held above him. He was naked and, oddly, seemed to have lost his body hair. Was he a member of one of those newfangled religions, she wondered. There was something sacred about the way he was moving. A practicing Catholic, she thought it might be a sin to watch the pagan rites of another even if she had appropriated him for her own erotic life. Switching the vacuum cleaner back on, she stoically turned her back.

  The sage gave off a sickly sweet smell. The whitish fog sank to the ground, curling along the carpets, then rose steadily as Gavin walked backward and forward. He wondered if he should be chanting. The only thing that came to mind was the anthem of the Broncos. Determined, he sang it over and over like a hymn.

  Reaching the bedroom he inched along the bed, making sure he didn’t catch sight of himself in the mirror opposite. The smoke spilled languidly from the stems and across the bed, covering the shiny sheets with a pale mist.

  Turning to go into the living room he caught a glimpse of his reflected feet at the edge of his gaze. They appeared to be covered with long matted fur and caked in a brownish sludge. Stunned, Gavin immediately blotted the image from his mind. “Go away, begone,” he muttered over and over—a line he remembered from a horror film he’d seen as a child. “Go, go, begone.”

  An old man’s head suddenly manifested out of the smoke, leering up at him and mouthing the words flitter, flitter, his face a translucent death mask. The tramp again.

  Shrieking, Gavin dropped the smoldering sage and ran full pelt into the balcony door. His body hit the glass like a bullet. The door shattered into a thousand glittering pieces that rained down with a tinkling sound. The property developer fell through onto the balcony, cracking his head on the floor. He lay curled like a fetus. Tiny glass splinters ran down one side of his body; catching the city lights they shimmered like miniature daggers. Beads of blood pooled at each tip.

  Rain began to fall in heavy tropical droplets—a hot summer shower that increased in tempo until it drummed against the glass and concrete. Still Gavin lay motionless, his unconscious mind tumbling like an injured hawk.

  Scarlet began to thread itself through a viscous mass of gray; sensation ran like trickling sand across his wakening nerves. The gray shifted to a copper haze with a lip of sunlight. Gavin blinked and his eyes cleared. Groaning, he flexed as feeling flooded back into his bruised limbs. He opened his eyes and found that he was staring at the sunrise framed by the steel balcony wall and the edge of the concrete floor.

  The sun rose, a lazy orb that disappeared behind the frosted glass. Somewhere someone coughed. Shocked, Gavin sat up, then realized it had been himself. There were pinpricks of heat down his chest and left arm. Dispassionately he pulled out one of the splinters and watched the blood roll down his shaven arm, now prickling in an angry rash.

  He stood and hobbled back into the flat. The phone rang. Ignoring it he went straight to the bed and lying carefully on his intact side fell asleep.

  “Gavin, this is your irate lawyer speaking. Where are you? You were due in court this morning—your failure to appear has meant an automatic transfer of ownership of Bridgeport to Cathy. Sorry, mate, there was nothing I could do. We can contest but you have to ring me. I’m beginning to get worried.”

  “Boss, this is Shortstuff here. You haven’t turned up to work for over a week now. I’ve been covering for you but I don’t know how much longer I can hold out. There are papers to be signed, and I need your permission for some new orders. Ring me, boss….”

  “Gavin, this is Amanda here, I miss you. Ring me, I love you. You can come out of the cave now, truly. Ring me. Big kiss, your baby.”

  “Dad, it was my birthday on Tuesday and you didn’t ring. Mum says it’s because you forgot and now that you have your own life you don’t care, but I don’t believ
e her. Ring me, it’s Irene and I’m ten now in case you did forget.”

  Flitter, flitter. He thought it was the ocean. Or maybe the sound of a ceiling fan sinking lower and lower until it felt close enough to cut off his head. Then he realized it was his phone. There was blinding pain, the light was dazzling, but he was awake. He reached over and knocked the phone off the hook. A female voice sounded out, tinny in the mute room, then came the bleep bleep of the dial tone. Gavin lay still for a second, gathering his strength. Apart from an itchiness that ran across his body like an infrared map joining heat point to heat point, he felt good, strong. He now knew what to do.

  He stepped out of the car. He was naked beneath the polyester shirt and trousers and the shaving rashes smoldered on his skin like bubbling tar. Determined not to scratch, he clutched at the digital camera slung around his neck; he usually used it to photograph his properties but now he was going to use it like a gun. Like a fucking gun.

  It was hot. Summer had blossomed without him noticing. The thick air pressed against his temples and the wind-borne pollen irritated his sinuses. He walked across the road toward the vacant lot. Shortstuff had been busy—the area had been cleared except for a pile of rubble and bush at the very back. Gavin unlocked the gate. It was Sunday and the place was silent except for a flock of parakeets who chirped and squabbled in a line of trees across the road and the 5:17 Qantas flight to Sydney roaring overhead. In front of him stretched a sea of concrete.

  Gavin kneeled, pressing down with his thumb. The cement was slightly soft. Poured about a week ago, he thought. He stood; there was no sign of him. No abandoned medicine bag, no tattered coat.

  “Where are you?” Gavin bellowed. The parakeets scattered like confetti as his voice bounced back. “Hello!”

  Nothing but silence and the distant sound of a lawn mower. What if he’d gone? What if he couldn’t find him? What then?