Black Rock White City

by A. S. Patric

  Jovan knocks on the mesh of the security door because he can’t open it while Suzana is sitting there, blocking the door. She stands up and lets him take the three steps down into their backyard. She drinks the final sip from a cup of chamomile that went cold hours ago—so she has something to do with her hands. She took a sleeping pill. It’s wearing off and Jovan simply standing there is too solid and big, and altogether too awake. Suzana sits down again.

  “All the lights were on in the house again. It makes me think there’s been some kind of emergency. And then you’re just out here anyway.”

  “You worried about the bills?”

  “I don’t give a fuck about the bills.”

  No pleasantries today. Unusually aggressive. She looks up at him.

  “I haven’t made dinner,” she says.

  “I’m starving,” he says.

  “Why don’t you call me before you come home? Maybe you should start doing that. I can’t guarantee a three-course dinner every evening.”

  “Fuck off with the three-course bullshit, Suzana. Let’s work out how to feed ourselves regularly.”

  “You should go out. Sit down at a table in a restaurant like a civilised man. Enjoy a glass of fine wine. Why not?” she suggests.

  Jovan’s teeth come together. Grind once and then he lets it go. The quick conversion in his eyes, fury into pity. Suzana is happy to go to bed without dinner. It’s something Jovan can’t imagine doing. He might sneer at a three-course meal yet three meals a day form a structure that he can’t do without. He wouldn’t know it was morning unless he’d had breakfast, afternoon unless he’d eaten lunch, and evening if he wasn’t sitting down to dinner.

  Jovan says, “There’s a new place I passed along Wells Street the other day. Thai food. It reminded me of Cotton Tree.” The first time he’d had Thai food.

  She turns her face from Jovan, back to the fence. The rosellas have taken to the air. Maybe he thinks she’s been sitting here for hours, no birds to look at, staring at that unpainted wooden fence or the television on the grass in the middle of the yard.

  Those birds: they’re vivid drops and splashes of colour, applied directly from God’s paintbrush. The red so vivid, not blood or rose or lipstick or any of the cliché reds. A purer, more startling red. She’d wanted to share that thought with him because God was a word that didn’t feel bankrupt from his mouth—that quiet way he folded his hands on his chest when they both settled in bed and the pathetic silence as he said his prayers.

  “How’s that sound?” he asks.

  “Why not?” she says. “Order me whatever you think. I might peck a bit, like one of those rosellas. ‘Sing a delighted song from the palm of your heart’, afterwards.”

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “What the fuck is what?”

  “Sing from my palm?”

  “Don’t read into it, Joe.” She uses the name they gave him in the hospital, speaking to him in English.

  “The next thing, I’m putting you in a cage. Is that the metaphor you’re using?” Resolutely in Serbian.

  “I was quoting one of your own poems, you idiot.”

  A slight movement of his face backwards and a double blink. “I don’t recall. Must be one of the early ones.”

  Suzana looks up at him, not blinking. “I thought you were starving.”

  “So, Thai?”

  “Alright.”

  “Okay.” He nods at her and then nods again. “Okay.”

  The two Okays make her think of Glen Coultas. She was at Prospect Grove this morning and she was supposed to go back there for her afternoon shift. There are messages on the machine. Jovan never notices it no matter the red light blinking or number of calls recorded. Suzana hears him snatch up his keys from the kitchen table. She sits down again. So many keys, most of them needed for the hospital, clattering from a variety of circular links. A system he’s developed to navigate hospital and home. Jangling through the house and out the front door—ignoring the two messages on the answering machine. The phone rang twice while Suzana sat on the back steps. Coultas, she assumes.

  The panel van roars into life again. She closes her eyes. Hates that sound more every day. The Ford drove them all the way up north and back south to Frankston without leaving them stranded anywhere. Unbelievable. She shakes her head. The damned thing will not die. They’d slept in the back of the van a few times. She hated the vehicle even then and on the way back down the coast told Jovan that would never be an option again. The vague smells of turpentine, paint, motor oil, could never be washed out, no matter how well he had cleaned the entire vehicle, inside and out. Not that it bothered Jovan. It was as though he’d been a fucking tradesman his whole life.

  Jovan has said he’d paint the fence, across those rusting nails, and Suzana told him not to be a fool. It wasn’t their house. Slavko is paying off his own home now; before he did, he lived in a rental as well and spent time painting things, replacing and improving, putting in a skylight in the dreary lounge to open it up to a brilliant waterfall of sunshine. The landlord was happy to see all the improvements but never offered concessions in rent. In the end, the landlord kicked out Slavko and his family and sold a much improved property.

  Suzana stands up again. Walks into the house—dark except for the light in the hallway. Such a lightless bunker of a building. Even during the day, at the height of summer, it has a cavernous quality. She’s already dreading winter. The windows are too small, badly arranged, and the place is surrounded by sunlight-swallowing trees. East facing, so they get light in the morning for about fifteen minutes. Suzana has been outside for hours, watching the afternoon dissolve into evening over the back fence.

  The rosellas are quiet. They don’t have a song. It’s a scrambled Morse code when they congregate. A chaos of squeaking that can’t mean anything even in their stupid heads. When she’s hanging clothes they will often mill about her feet, as if they’ve never been kicked or scattered, and have nothing to fear from people. When they’re quiet, they’re beautiful and she moves across the grass carefully. Today she took a sleeping pill so she could go out among them to hang the clothes. The huge, water-heavy overalls belonging to her husband, her worn-out dresses weighing nothing in comparison, the other odds and ends of their lives. She watched them drying and waving with every movement of the air.

  Suzana leaves her handbag and takes nothing with her as she walks toward the front door, pausing only to put her shoes on and to take an envelope of money she got from Coultas in the morning. She has a vague intention—of seeing the water. They lived near the ocean yet almost never saw it except through car windows. Every night they talked about how to free themselves, how they might drive up there again, how to find the time and energy. A holiday all the way up north, pushing out around the continental belly of Australia to get to a stretch of coast, when there’s sand and water nearby. An easy half-hour walk away from where they live right now. Suzana leaves the front door open. The security doors bangs shut behind her as she walks out onto the street.

  Suzana gives the man at the counter a false name, Rhonda Johnson, so she won’t need to spell it out for him three times. So she won’t have to answer questions about her origins and then be forced to be an ambassador for Serbia for some motel flunky, who, five minutes later, would be thinking about the footy scores, interested in the statistics of bombs but couldn’t care less where they fell—as though they were sports stats in a game that no one cared about in Australia. Just chit-chat. Rhonda Johnson. Suzana is forced to repeat it. She can see the motel concierge doesn’t believe her. She can’t be Rhonda Johnson. Suzana signs it carefully, remembering the silent H in both words.

  “That’s an interesting accent,” he says.

  “Thank you, if ‘interesting’ is a compliment. If not, keep quiet. You might avoid insulting your guests.”

  “Yes. A compliment. I’m sorry. I like your voice. That’s the main thing. I wasn’t trying to offend you.”

  “Trying to of
fend? When would anyone try to offend someone?”

  “I wouldn’t. I don’t know. I …”

  Suzana stops, leans forward a few millimetres. His earnest eyes in his fat face. The tight motel uniform, pushing at the buttons traversing the mountain of his belly. It’s a pathetic thing to do—pin someone working behind a counter in a shitty job. Despite that, desperate to keep it. And it isn’t as if he wants this conversation either. Maybe that’s why the English expression chit-chat reminds her of shrapnel. Of the countermeasure explosive and the word ‘chaff’.

  “My apologies.” No more chit-chaff.

  “It’s fine. I’ll take it as a compliment.” She gives him a curt nod. “Can you confirm that my room has a view of the ocean?”

  Suzana isn’t interested in the sea. Not really. The bed is all she cares about. She walks away from the counter feeling conspicuous by her lack of luggage. She’s wearing a summery yellow blouse she bought a few days ago in Brighton, so at least she doesn’t look as though she’s desperate and homeless. Maybe she strikes the concierge as a forlorn wife escaping the clutches of a violent husband.

  She walks the hallway, thinking about the bed, fatigue deep in her bones. She knows she’ll be able to sleep tonight. That’s all she needs. To fall asleep quickly and stay that way for eight hours. Even a solid stretch of four hours will do. A door ajar, she pushes it open. Wants to get inside to collapse on the hotel bed—sagging in spots that thousands of bodies have worn into the mattress over the years. To find rest in that kind of patina seems perfect and poetic to her sleepy mind. A nest to curl up into.

  A woman and a man. Noises first. Muffled grunts. The surprised oh, again and again. Suzana takes another two steps into the room before she can stop. It takes her a second to understand that there’s been a mistake. That’s how sleepy she is. This wasn’t a show on the television. Motel porn. They’re fucking on the bed. The man is behind the woman, his eyes closed, the final few thrusts. The woman is looking up at Suzana. Muted. Unresponsive. Waiting for her lover to finish. Not wanting his last blissful moment to abruptly cease. Unable to indicate her surprise even by blinking.

  Suzana backs away, thinking, perhaps the other woman was the kind that will tell her lover afterwards, and they will laugh. Suzana closes the door on her way out. Before she does, she makes sure it’s locked. Pulls it shut loudly. Angry at the swelling embarrassment. She doesn’t have room for anything else in her mind. Yet another emotion to deal with. Maybe sleep isn’t a certainty here, after all. And no sleeping pills to help now.

  Her room is the one next door and she unlocks it with the key and steps inside. The television in the room, silent, up on the wall. A red light indicating it is on standby. A push of the button. She gazes out at the ocean instead. The grey steel of Port Phillip Bay, the way its leaden stillness kills the idea of an ocean. A large body of water is not the same thing. That was why they went all the way north, to see the pulse of the planet throbbing back toward the land. The clear blue immensity of it unrolling their souls for them so they could see the reflected reaches of stars and cosmos in themselves. More of Jovan’s poetry. No escaping him, it seems. The red light in the television—a hook in the corner of her eye. She picks up the remote, doesn’t press the button. Chucks it back onto the coffee table. It clatters and the batteries spill out.

  Up north was the last time they were able to function as a couple. Both of them had thought it was a new beginning. It turned out to be a new end. What do they have now? It isn’t ‘making love’ as they say in English, and it isn’t fucking, it’s that kind of anomalous thing they call ‘having sex’. So delicately referred to when it is phrased that way. She doesn’t use Serbian words because she doesn’t think about the act without everything else flooding through, along with more familiarity. So it’s the sedate English way of doing things when they ‘have sex’. She couldn’t hear the couple next door. Maybe they were already gone.

  Suzana winces. The last two times might qualify as having sex but Jovan had not been able to ejaculate the time before those. That had surprised her. It would have been more understandable if he hadn’t been able to get an erection. The useless back and forth was worse. A tearing impotency. Pulling away and slumping down onto the bed. An apology. A week later they tried again. His body above, locked elbows, a suspension bridge, both of them silent. His eyes needed to be closed. His mind had to forget everything. That was the trick. And yet, neither of them found much more satisfaction in the two times since, even if technically ‘successful’. Pleasure was beside the point. It was a decision to have another child. Another new beginning now ending.

  When she lies on the bed she realises she’s ravenous. Sleep will be impossible. That hunger growing within her. A void sucking her away. She calls the front desk. It’s the same man she talked to when she checked in. He tells her everything is closed. There’s a pause, silence. Suzana wonders if he will hang up if she doesn’t speak again. Maybe they’ve got a bag of nuts somewhere. Some bread. She doesn’t ask.

  “There’s an all-night pizza place. I could call them for you.”

  “Thank you,” Suzana says.

  “What kind of pizza do you like?”

  “Any kind. Except the marine pizza.”

  “Do you mean marinara?”

  “Yes,” says Suzana. “I mean marinara.”

  “OK,” the concierge says. “No marinara.”

  Suzana decides to take a shower while she waits for the food. The water blasts out of the shower head. On Reservoir Road their water pressure, ironically, is weak. The water in the Best Western hurts it has so much force. She turns up the heat until she’s being scoured. Washes her hair with the motel’s shampoo and conditioner. Running the knots out of her long hair with her fingers. The two tiny bottles are empty after her shower. She dries herself with the white towels, the flat kind motels use and not the fluffy, luxurious ones they have in hotels. The motley array of towels on her line at home would be dry. She hung those before going to the Coultas home this morning. Jovan would have brought them in by now.

  Her bare feet on the cool tiles. The wet footprints. One towel for her head and another for her body. Dries herself as she glances in the mirror. Feels as little for the naked image of herself in the mirror as she did for the woman being fucked in the room next door. A hotel would have a robe. That’s another difference. One of those fluffy robes would be wonderful. She moves back to the main room and its bed. Places two pillows behind her as she waits. No view of the ocean out her window because the lights are switched on inside now and there’s no illumination out there—no stars and no moon and no ships. The pitch black glass. Her reflection again. An anonymous woman propped up against a bed head and an exposed brick wall.

  A nurse, hand on Suzana’s shoulder. That careful shake to awake the sick. Jovan is outside. Suzana tells the nurse she doesn’t want to see him. The nurse comes back a little while later and gives her a glass of water. Helps her drink. Sits on the side of the bed and helps Suzana hold the glass. Holding the glass of water is almost impossible. She never thought she’d be this weak. Amazed that she can be so feeble. The nurse tells Suzana her husband is still waiting outside. Suzana recalls other times the nurse has given her this information.

  Suzana is so enervated she is afraid to go back to sleep. It’s as though sleep is heavy and it will fall onto her with the weight of a collapsing building. Had that been one of her dreams when she was asleep? A collapsing building. Dying in the crumbs of concrete. Her arms bandaged. Despite the painful changes of bandages the nurse has put her through, the white fabric soaking up dots of strawberry colour, reminding her of a handkerchief used to wipe red jam from a child’s lips.

  Too exhausted to say no again, she nods at the nurse this time and when Jovan walks into the hospital room, the room becomes a room, the man in the doorway a man, and the suicide in the bed is a suicide. It is Belgrade, this is Zemun Hospital, the same hospital she was born in thirty-one years ago, everything real and concre
te, yet incomplete because she is still alive and there is this room, and this man, Jovan Brakochevich, is waiting for her.

  That goliath doesn’t move from the doorway and she has never seen him cry before. She has never seen his face fall into such open grief, arms useless by his sides, unable to lift and hide his face from the nurses or doctors and other patients in the room. Helpless in the doorway until she manages to raise a hand to him and when he takes it she knows he has pulled her back into the world. For an instant she feels nothing but fury. As if she’s been tricked. His stupid fucking tears, crying like a child.

  Had there been a knock at the door? It registered somewhere in her brain. A few minutes for the information to reach awareness. Suzana gets out of bed and opens the door. The pizza is sitting on the carpeted floor. The proud face of a chef kissing his fingers stencilled into the top of the box. The hallway long and empty. She picks up the warm box and takes it inside. The red standby light is not on because she pulled the plug on the television before having her shower.

  The small motel room is quiet and perfectly bland. Not one thing in it to draw her attention. She can barely eat a slice of pizza before her eyes are closed. She manages to get beneath the sheets of the bed. The flat pillow. That rough anonymous feel to the sheets. Lovely. The vague whiff of hospital bleach. Ammonia. The word drifts through her mind. A place like Patagonia. More asleep than awake, she thinks, what a wonderful place that would be to go for a holiday.

  Ammonia.

  Jelka sits down in an old wooden swivel seat beside Suzana. Jelka tells her she’s never been to the State Library as she leans upwards from the chair to admire a green reading lamp.