by A. S. Patric
“Graffito did something similar to that optometrist, didn’t he?”
“Miss Richards was already very isolated and unhappy. If a person’s on the edge it doesn’t take much of a push. It’s not as if the guy is a criminal mastermind.”
“No, but it sounds as though he’s fully invested—in people, rather than the place. The hospital is his world and everyone within it belongs to him. Twenty letters isn’t a casual interest. That’s real commitment.”
“To what?” Jovan asks.
“To putting his pain into someone else,” Suzana says, as though it should be obvious.
“How’s that a relief for Graffito?”
“Seeing your madness in someone else might make it feel more bearable. Even if it’s only a moment. And then you go back to the unbearable and wait for it to break you again.”
Jovan thinks about Vladimir Mitrovich drinking that bottle of Belgrade rakia. “We all want to see ourselves reflected in the world. Is that it? He’s thinking—”
“It doesn’t matter what he’s thinking,” Suzana cuts him off. “My point is that he’s not invested in only Miss Richards and Bill Dimitriadis. You get what I’m saying, right?”
Jovan nods. “Ethical cleansing.”
“Finish your tea,” Suzana says. Jovan finishes the rest of the cup in two swallows. She walks over to him, lifts his face and looks at him for a few seconds, puts her lips to his forehead, and then pushes his head away playfully.
“So you’re done with that place?” she asks.
“Done as the dog’s dinner,” he says in English, sounding Aussie for the first time ever, and makes Suzana laugh. She gets up and gets ice cream from the freezer and fills two bowls.
She says, “Carlo has been barking all morning. You should take him for a walk.”
“I will.” They move the spoons to their mouths slowly. Jovan says, “I just noticed that we don’t have any pictures of us on the wall. You and me.”
Suzana shrugs and turns her spoon in the cream at the edge of the bowl, where it’s already beginning to melt. She says, “We should put some up.”
“It’s been a while since we took any photos. Let’s not put up anything old.”
“We should buy a camera. I don’t know if we should be spending a few hundred dollars on a camera if you’re quitting your hospital job. We can wait for some photos.”
“David Dickens is an amateur photographer. That’s part of the reason he’s putting together that book about graffiti.”
“Alright, but give me some warning. In fact, give me a warning anytime that guy’s coming over, with or without his camera.” She gets up and goes to the dining room table to continue her novel. “I might get Jelka to come over and give me a touch up. She’ll bring a whole wardrobe.” Suzana sits down at the table and opens her notebooks.
“Maybe we should get you a computer,” Jovan suggests.
“I sometimes get nostalgic for my typewriter.” She’s distracted.
“Slavko has been asking me to go paint houses with him for a while now. There’s good money in it.” He leans back in his chair and he raises an eyebrow, “And if people ask me what I do, I’ll make sure I’m wearing a beret and tell them, I’m a painter.”
Suzana glances out the window to where Charlemagne lopes along to an old fellow about to slot some advertising into their letter box, and then thinking better of it when he sees the monster dog moving towards him.
She nods. Says, “Maybe you should rest today. Carlo can wait until tomorrow.” She’s bent over her pages. She makes a selection from her mug full of pens. She smoothes the paper and waits for the words to emerge.
He sits awhile and watches Suzana write. He’s been reading her novel and he is looking forward to finding out what happens next, now the Janissary is nearing the concourse of the Sava and Danube rivers, about to enter old Belgrade. It’s strange to think that the rest of the book doesn’t exist, yet here it is with the movements of her fingers. He sees her left hand unconsciously move to her belly again.
Jovan sits in the kitchen and yawns. He stretches his arms out wide. Walks his plate and cup to the sink and washes them, gazing out the kitchen window into the backyard. No rosellas today. They’re frightened of the giant dog prowling around but soon should get used to the harmless monster. He pushes open the back security door and sits on the steps. It doesn’t take Charlemagne long to come trotting over to Jovan. He nuzzles at Jovan’s shoulder and then detects movement and off he goes again—across the lawn.
A sparrow picking at the roots of grass, head half in these emerald blades, head half in a cutting paradise, this world of crumbs from God’s broken soul, head half out, among the emerald blades, small sharpened eyes looking for the seeds of paradise.
* * *
Suzana lowers herself into the water. The blue water ripples across the surface until those long, languorous moments when that luminescent skin is perfectly calm. The whole twenty-five metre pool—perfectly placid. Pacific. Suzana takes that word down into the water with her, breaking that lovely blue surface, and paddles into the middle of the near empty public pool. Drifts out into a pacific blue.
The name a Conquistador gave to the ocean after he’d crossed through Central America. The first Spaniard to do so. He called it the Pacific. Such a lovely word in English. When Suzana first heard this story she thought the ocean must have been very calm that day. She reaches the opposite wall of the Frankston pool and knows it had far more to do with the turbulence of that man’s life easing away as he reached the final limits of his world.
A few remaining children by the side of the pool are plucked out of the water by their parents. A fat man trundles along to the change rooms with his thongs slapping the heels of his yellow calloused heels, his arm picking out the material of his bathers from his blubberous crotch. The lifeguard has announced that they’re closing in fifteen minutes and he now goes to attend to a problem at the front counter. He’s already rolled up the long blue non-slip maps around the pool and hosed down some of the concrete.
It leaves the entire area the way Suzana likes it. No infant screams, no loud bellows from males exchanging lewd insights, no women and their cackled commentary. Even when they were silent, people created ripples or waves simply breathing. There was nothing like being alone in a large body of water. Suzana let herself drift—half submerged on her back, her ears subdued by the gentle lapping of the water, not worrying about getting in someone’s way, a man’s penetrating eyes or women comparing themselves and evaluating.
The lifeguard hasn’t returned and it occurs to Suzana that it’s a bit early to do away with all the safety measures. Rolling up the long blue mats and watering the concrete before all the children had even been led away. The lifeguard gone, despite a woman well along in her pregnancy, drifting around. Suzana is happy to be alone yet she’s aware of her own perversity as she feels annoyed by the way this solitude has come about. She drifts across the water, her growing belly above the waterline, a corkscrew smile works its way across her lips—how difficult it is for her to really allow herself pleasure and freedom.
Her eyes are closed. She doesn’t notice a thin man slipping into the pool without a splash. Suzana tries to relax before she’s called out of the water by the lifeguard. The pressure on her bladder had come much sooner than in her previous pregnancies. What’s the difference this time around? Perhaps it’s because she’s older. Her aging bladder had forced her to the toilet every ten minutes today. She should let herself urinate in the pool as she suspects most of the children do. How many times had she waddled over the rough concrete? How many times struggling out of the wet bathing suit? She wants a long rest now in the water. Feeling the float of her new body. She feels the water moving around her as the thin man comes close.
Suzana tilts her head a little further back so that her ears go under water and she can hear her own breathing, and lets all of her tumbled-over thinking stop spinning for a moment, folding into the calm space of air mov
ing cool down through her lips and out again. Listens to that hypnotic rhythm of breathing, her belly, nose and mouth breaking the surface. Letting go of all her thoughts.
Suzana is pushed under water. She is annoyed, not much more than that. This is some kind of accident. Her eyes are open below the water and she sees a torso black with tattoos. The arms and legs are strangely free of the ink—pale white limbs. She’s that clear in her mind. She notices this disparity. Across his chest, among the many, many words are three fractured skulls, and within them: The Trojan Flea.
Suzana had been struck by that expression the first time Jovan told her months ago about Dr Graffito. His other hand is now over the top of her head as he pushes her deeper under the water, the rough heels of his feet are brutal as they push down her thighs. She begins to struggle frantically, the nails of his toes claw down her chest, just as frantic to keep her below. Perhaps only a minute. The air has escaped her so it doesn’t take long before she’s taking in the chlorinated water, filling her stomach and lungs. And then there is nothing but rest at the bottom of the pool. Silence and stillness, and then not even the darkness.
Jovan crashes his panel van. It’s not a major accident. Ironic, because he finally got around to changing his brake pads a few weeks ago. Overcompensating and locking up the wheels on a damp road, making the van swerve off the side into a telephone pole. A kid on a bike darted out from a driveway. Jovan is not hurt. The van will need some panel beating, new shocks, and who knows what else? Not enough light to see what kind of damage in the undercarriage.
Suzana will be waiting so he sets off on foot. The Ford practically looks parked by the side of the road and Slavko can help him tow it home tomorrow morning. The Frankston Aquatic Centre isn’t too far away from his crash. He will still be late. They can catch a taxi home. Suzana will tell him that there’s no way he should get the van fixed and he’ll have to buy a new car. It’s amazing how much she hates the Ford. It’s senseless. Well, maybe not. How had he become such a total blue-collar ‘bloke’, as Australians said, that he doesn’t have a regular car? He’d left no room for himself to be anything else other than the guy in that rust-bucket of a vehicle, his white Ford panel van. That was her point, even if she’s never come out and said it. He’s not wearing a watch so he’s not sure how late he’ll be. He begins to walk quickly. He waits for her outside in the van normally and it’s often a quick ride home so she can use the toilet. He doesn’t remember her bladder being this weak with the previous pregnancies.
The lifeguard is a teenager and he’s on the phone having the kind of argument it’s only possible to have with another teenager that he’s in love with. Accusations and profanities and it doesn’t matter who’s around to hear. Jovan walks through the internal doors that lead to the pool area. No point waiting outside when he doesn’t have the van. He decides that the first thing he’ll tell Suzana is not that he had an accident, rather, that he’s decided he’s going to buy a new car since he’s now got the new job and tonight they’ll go out to Frankston pier with some fish and chips. The last time he went out there he was feeling lonesome and the idea of taking Suzana to the pier feels good. She’s got her own ideas and he wonders whether he’ll be able to persuade her as he walks into the empty pool area.
No one’s around other than a thin man in the water near the edge. Jovan blinks and realises he recognises him from the hospital. One of the surgeons he never had a reason to talk with. As soon as the doctor lifts his head there’s a different kind of recognition. The man has tattoos across his torso, and every word is familiar to Jovan—he has obliterated most of them from the hospital’s walls. INSPIRATION down the centre of his chest. Words pushing in, crossing over each other. Obliteration. Oblivion. Self-made tattoos, letters cut into the flesh as deep as they would go. A God of Small Knives. A Devil of Deep Cuts. And in red letters, set within three skulls lined up across the man’s heart, The Trojan Flea.
Suzana wakes trying to breathe out water. She’s coughing up chlorine for a long time. Coughing so much she doesn’t think she’ll ever stop. Taking in air is all she can think about for minutes. And then she’s aware that she’s lying on her side and the first thing she does is reach down for the bump. Pulled out of the water by the wrist as if she weighed nothing. She remembers the ferocious grip on her wrist, the severance beforehand, the void she’d fallen into so total she only felt it when she was rejoined, ready to go on clinging to the immense arm that had pulled her from the water.
She closes her eyes, still coughing, listening and waiting for a movement. Nothing else can happen now. Wait for a kick or a punch. Wait. Wait. Wait. There it is. That faint tingle as an elbow nudges her spine.
When she opens her eyes there’s a man bleeding from his face, his nose, his ears, and a mouth missing most of its teeth. Teeth being washed down the grates by the side of the pool. The blood dripping down his face and cleaned away by the filters. The water would still be deep blue. She can’t see it. All she can see is the blood. Pacific. What a lovely word that is. Dead. The man can’t be alive.
Her colossus is bringing down one rock-crushing fist after another into the man’s body and then into his face again. Another tooth comes loose. Kicking within her. Alive and as deep as the Pacific. Safe and sound in those words. Her husband. How good. The only thing she can think is how powerful and great, how strong and noble. Jovan’s Pacific eyes. His mouth set—a storm swallowed. As expressionless as a god’s face as he does his work. Obliterating every other word. And how good she thinks, how good. Her Jovan. Her husband. Her good man. How very good. As expressionless as a god remaking the world.
A. S. Patrić is the award winning author of Las Vegas for Vegans, published in 2012 by Transit Lounge. Las Vegas for Vegans was shortlisted for the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards’ Steele Rudd Prize. He is also the author of Bruno Kramzer and The Rattler & other stories. Alec lives in bayside Melbourne and is a St Kilda bookseller.
