‘I’m looking at our options. Trying to take the pressure off you,’ he said.
It’s impossible to think of working again in the department, or at the university, living back in Hobart with its familiar hills and valleys, Mount Wellington looming overhead, the harbour lapping at its feet, the little houses crowded on its hills, backyards largely free of swimming pools in that chilly climate. Safe, familiar.
‘If I can get enough commissions, say two or three, we could go straight away,’ Finn says. ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a job.’
Without a job what machinery would grind the moving hours past? Without some slender thread holding you to the world, who knows where and how far you might fall?
‘I need to work, Finn.’
He nods. ‘Sure. But we’ve got to get home.’
You turn and put your hands on the bench. Outside the sky is all kinds of vermillion and orange, streaked with light, speckled with flying foxes streaming from their roosts into the evening. You remember that Hobart smelled of lavender and brine and empty oceans and Antarctica. Here smells like Asia: shiitake mushrooms, frangipani, mildew and bat shit. You’ve been foreigners all along, out of your element. If you’d stayed at home, this would never have happened.
When you fall into bed not long after dinner, Finn reaches for you and for the first time there is humming intent in his hold. You’ve wept, separately and together, each night for the past seven, but there’s been no desire. Now, suddenly, you feel it flaring in him.
It might be comfort, perhaps, and release. Connection, skin, breath, life. But you’ve stitched together someone to be and those threads are so thin and stretched that anything might snap them. You’ve created a person who might be able to get you through, a person who can forget, for some moments here and there, dragging her drowned son from the water.
You can’t think of that. You can think of Finn and the gate and the stupid Owl Sentry. You can think of your older son, your ordinary son. It wasn’t Jarrah who blew your world. Jarrah was, and continues to be, exactly what you’d expected from a child. The most normal kid you could imagine.
Toby, on the other hand, did nothing but surprise you. He hurtled into the world, uncontainable. A force of nature, Finn used to call him. Like he was going to reach out and devour the world. So dangerous, you now know, to live like that. To treat the world without fear. It should be feared.
Finn reaches for you and as his body presses against yours he could be a stranger, coming at you so tentatively, trembling.
‘Please,’ he whispers, and he draws you against him slowly, not daring to demand. You almost wish he’d stop asking, stop making you the decider and just take you. Fuck you so hard you could get lost in it. Fuck you past this agony.
Your traitorous body feels him and some primal biology kicks in so you are suddenly ravenous. You roll on top, straddle him, feel his surprise and matching desire. You can’t kiss him, not that, but after just a few moments of grinding together you position yourself and thrust down so he impales you. You groan, deep and guttural, just as he does, you rise up and come down furiously, hands on his chest. From indifference to hot and hard and slick in seconds, agonising and irresistible at once. You’re rutting like animals that have tasted death and want nothing of it.
You’re going to come; you can’t believe it. When you do, it blazes through like rage and you look down at his face. In that second you hate him with your whole being. His eyes roll back a little and he arches and cries out and in your mind you’ve killed him and it’s gore, not sex, that slicks over your body. It’s the only punishment that matches the crime, your rage’s obliteration of him.
You slide off and he pulls you down and sobs, hulking sobs in the space between your breasts. Then he falls silent, and a moment later twitches, and you know he’s dropped into post-orgasmic sleep. You lie next to him, shuddering deep inside. It’s dangerous to be open to the world and dangerous to be open to him. Coming, you felt the start of a primal shriek you couldn’t afford to utter. And so you roll away from him, clamp your legs together, clench your jaw and fight down that shriek, wrestle it down to its dark hiding place and shut the lid on it.
He sleeps, damn him, like a child, sweaty and restless and deep, whimpering and crying out but never waking. Toby used to sleep like that, bringing you to wakefulness often with his thrashing and murmurs. He’d wake in the morning revitalised, while you were shredded. Orgasm has stoked your rage and focused it more freely on Finn, who dares to sleep, dares to breathe, dares to sweat and weep and pant and ejaculate.
You’d thought that after a week you might have been able to comfort each other, but your fury is deepening and widening, becoming inexorable, soldered onto the foundations of your being. It’s becoming the buttress to your grief, its equal and opposing force.
The clock flips its way around the hours, glowing red in the dark, and the night noises outside swell and subside, and the darkest, quietest hour arrives and somehow, eternally, passes. You can’t be close to Finn, but you can’t be too far away from him either, or what holds you upright will collapse.
He wakes at the first hint of light in the sky, some time a little after five. You hear him swim up to consciousness, his crusted eyelids cracking open, his tongue moistening his lips, the scratch of his nails on his belly. It’s repulsive.
You’re up on your elbow, facing away from him, watching the window. He rolls into your back, reaches out a hand and cups the curve of your hip bone.
‘I want you to sleep somewhere else.’
In the silent, shocked moment that follows he removes his hand from your skin. The only other room is Toby’s. Still untouched. You can feel his incredulity in the air between you.
‘The studio,’ you say. ‘There’s room for a bed.’
‘What will Jarrah think?’
You almost want to laugh at this. ‘He’ll think the world’s gone to shit, Finn.’
You get up and begin to dress, keeping your back to him.
JARRAH
‘How’s it, Jazz? Weekend OK?’
I hated people asking me that. But it was Laura, and she took my arm and looked at me, all soft and concerned, and I didn’t mind so much.
‘OK.’ My standard reply. Meant I could probably get through the day without falling apart. Not that I did fall apart. Not in front of anyone. Hadn’t cried since Toby’s funeral, not in public. Maybe that’s why they’d all forgotten.
They were all such kids. It was ten days since the funeral and it was like half of them had forgotten my brother was dead. Their lives just went on like usual. They got upset about stupid stuff, excited about stupid stuff.
Except Laura. She hadn’t forgotten.
‘Meet me after school?’ she whispered into my ear.
‘What for?’
‘You’ll see.’ She winked and went off to class.
Life after Toby, nothing was the same. Not that life was good before he died, but I kind of knew what to expect. Knew Laura was out of my reach. Knew the dangerous kids, and kept out of their way. Knew Billy was as lonely and weird as me, and we sometimes made a bigger target together than either of us alone – was careful not to hang out with him too much.
Now the dangerous kids ignored me, Billy wasn’t cool enough to hang with me, and Laura was my best friend. On the morning bus she saved me a seat. She’d look down the aisle to catch my eye and smile. When I sat down, that question: How’s it, Jazz? In the afternoon I watched her drama club rehearsals, or did my homework in the booth at the pizza place while she worked, and got dropped off home afterwards by her mother.
No one my age had ever looked at me like she did. I’d figured out how to control my face so she couldn’t see the effect it had on me. I sat next to her on the bus, our legs touching slightly. Sometimes she rested a hand on my shoulder, or touched my arm. She did it easily, like I would have touched Toby, like being rejected had never entered her mind.
I guess it hadn’t. When she walked down t
he hallway at school, people turned and their smiles were real. When Laura knew the answer to something in class, she just put up her hand and said it. She didn’t hide being clever. She did her homework but she wasn’t a perfectionist. She wasn’t a suck, but she was well behaved. She was normal, she was pretty, she was clever, she was popular. She even got on with her mother, who, by the way, was really nice to me.
Wish I could have enjoyed it more. Sometimes, for a second, I nearly forgot about Toby. It was worse then, because it hit me again in the guts.
I met her in the afternoon at the gate, thinking we’d walk to the bus stop. She gave a funny kind of smile without really looking at me.
‘Let’s go,’ she said, and headed in the opposite direction so fast I had to hurry to keep up.
There was a scrappy bush block at the back of the school. The edges were full of rubbish and weeds, and the place smelled of bats, because about a thousand of them slept in the trees all day and kept most people out. But there was a spot in the middle no one seemed to know about, away from the bats, where a little creek ran through a patch of tall trees. Kind of like a forest. I’d spent a few lunchtimes there.
Laura stopped at the edge, glanced back to make sure I was following, picked her way through the rubbish and found the twisting track. The ground was covered in dead leaves, and it was loud in there, with the bats squealing and flapping their wings as we walked under them. I followed her through the trees till we reached the creek. She stopped, dropped her pack on the ground and stepped down the bank till she was standing a little below me. The water was rushing and brown, swollen from rain the night before. She had that same smile as she turned. Stretched out, took my hand, pulled me towards her until we were nearly touching.
‘I know you haven’t …’ she said softly.
I could hardly breathe. She wanted me to kiss her. I had no idea how. My stomach churned. Wanted to bolt like an animal, crash through the trees, break out into the sunshine and sprint home.
She laughed a little. ‘You’re shaking. It’s not that scary!’
She was so close I could feel her breath on my neck. She dropped my hand, lifted her arms, put them round my neck. I wanted to kiss her but couldn’t move. Scared of doing it wrong.
She pulled me in until our lips met. She closed her eyes but I kept mine open, feeling like I might fall over. When she slipped her tongue into my mouth I had to stop myself jerking away with the strangeness of it.
I was nearly sixteen years old. I must have seen millions of screen kisses and a few real-life ones, but they didn’t help. I was a late starter. I should have been prepared but it felt weird.
I took hold of her waist and kissed her back, trying hard.
She broke away. ‘Easy, Jazz. Nice and slow.’
OK, so less tongue. I tried again and she kind of softened in my arms. I was getting the hang of it. It wasn’t bad, actually. She moved closer and I felt the brush of her breasts against my chest like an electric shock.
After a few minutes she stepped back and opened her eyes. I tried to read her face. Was I hopeless?
‘Um,’ I said. Stopped.
‘We’d better go,’ she said. ‘Mum’s picking me up at four, after extra maths.’
‘Extra maths?’
She shrugged. ‘Skipped it. Wanna lift?’
‘Yeah.’
I had no idea if I’d done it right. Wanted to kiss her again but wasn’t brave enough. Worried I hadn’t cleaned my teeth since after breakfast – no one cleaned their teeth at school, did they? – and that my breath was gross.
She grabbed my hand: that was something. We walked side by side on the narrow path, with me scraping past the trees. As we got near the edge, realised I didn’t want to go out there again. Strange though the kiss had been, for the first time I wasn’t thinking about Toby for a few minutes.
I stopped, pulled her round. ‘Hey.’
She stepped in, put her palms on either side of my face. I knew what to expect this time and I leaned in to meet her. Shut my eyes and focused on the feeling of her lips on mine. Let my mouth open more naturally.
It was shorter, but when she drew back she was smiling.
‘Fast learner, Jazz-boy. Now come on! Mum’ll be there.’
She tugged my hand and we broke into a run. I didn’t mind the branches slapping me in the face. I was smiling too. Our second kiss wasn’t so weird. I’d felt more like a teenage boy kissing the girl he worshipped. It was good.
FINN
Finn rested his shaking hands on the bench, breathing through his mouth to minimise the stink of ozone and molten steel. That had been the smell filling his nostrils when he’d first heard the sound. He’d released the trigger, raised his goggles, and heard it again. The sound no one should ever hear. The sound of Bridget finding Toby.
He clenched his jaw. He wanted to tear the torch from its moorings and fling it over the fence. Or turn it on Dragon Sentry, lying dismembered on the bench before him, and melt the contraption down to nothing. Once, Finn had been able to sculpt so that the world receded and the only reality was wood and steel and the stink of ozone and molten copper. He’d never get back there. It was too dangerous to let world and time disappear. Nothing would erase the fact that he’d welded with his back turned to the pool while his son had drowned.
Had he really promised Edmund he’d create more of these things? So pretty, so gleaming. So deadly. In the absence of another explanation, it seemed Owl Sentry had indeed failed. How else could Toby have got into the pool? Even the police seemed to have no idea. DI Evans had interviewed them both again, and the tone of the questions was more sinister, but it was clear she didn’t know either.
It was no good. He stripped off the goggles and threw them on the bench. Straightened, stretched the kinks from his back, strode to the door and crossed over to the house. He had to think. When she was at work during the day, he could pretend he still lived in the house instead of across the chasm that now separated him from Bridget. The pool literally lay between them.
Finn readied the Atomic and put it on the gas. He felt sick as the machine heated up and the smell of hot metal permeated the kitchen. Acid burned in the back of his throat. He turned off the gas, carried the machine to the door and hurled it into the garden.
As the thing bounced across the grass he saw Meredith closing the gate behind her. Finn groaned softly and closed his eyes. Was it too much to ask, that he could lose it for a moment and be unobserved?
When he opened his eyes she was advancing on him.
‘Finn,’ she said in her low voice. At least she didn’t try for a breezy greeting.
‘Rough day,’ he said, not looking at her.
‘I was passing. Thought I’d see how you’re getting on. It can’t be easy, working out there.’
Finn started to cry. It spilled over without conscious decision, weeping of the hopeless kind, a stream of tears soaking his face.
‘Let’s go in,’ Meredith said, putting a hand gently on his arm.
He allowed her to turn him and usher him up the steps. Without really knowing how, he found himself sitting at the table while she bustled around with kettle and milk and mugs.
‘You’ll find tea goes down better with this.’ She pulled a small bottle of brandy from her handbag. The smell of alcohol at ten in the morning made Finn dizzy. He took a gulp of brandy-laced tea that burned all the way down.
‘You always carry that?’
She smiled, a small, sad smile. ‘Unfortunately, yes.’
Finn took another gulp. ‘I had an agent around last week to look at selling the house. We haven’t signed or anything. But she’s just called to say she’s got someone keen, who’s only in town today.’
‘So you’re leaving?’
Finn nodded. ‘I guess so. But she wants me to clean out Toby’s room.’ He groped for a tissue, honked his nose, and took another gulp of tea.
‘When does she want to bring them?’
‘In an hour.’ Finn felt hi
s chest heave. With the flowers and candles and teddies out the front gone, Toby’s room was their own private shrine. Changing it from the day Toby died seemed an irrevocable step, and one that Bridget should have a say in. But the idea of texting or calling her to ask felt monumental.
‘Do you want me to help?’ When he didn’t answer, Meredith passed him another tissue. ‘I promise you, I’ll do it with love.’
Love was a word that hadn’t been said between Finn and Bridget since Toby died. He’d been too afraid to say it, too afraid of her response. Afraid the hate in her eyes would be articulated. He’d moved across the pool to the studio without complaint and endured the unendurable nights over there the same way. He was far enough away that she wouldn’t have to drive him further. A safe distance from which to wait and see what happened.
He looked over at Meredith, she of the brandy bottle in the handbag, and the foundation for dead children, and the understanding face.
‘I can’t go in there. Could you do it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think there are some boxes in the garage somewhere.’ He gestured vaguely.
She stood. ‘I’ll take care of it. Why don’t you clean up the living area and run a vacuum around the place? The two of us can get it looking fine in an hour.’
Finn watched her cross the lawn, open the garage, locate some boxes and carry them back. She’d appeared at the exact moment he needed help. She had brandy in her handbag. She was willing. So why didn’t he like her?
BRIDGET
Your second working week and the days have fallen into a pattern. You back the car out of the garage and drive to the office. You meet Chen in the car park, transfer into a state-owned four-wheel drive and head out to areas identified as likely or known koala habitat. Your body moves; you eat. You appear to be alive.
Chen makes you do all the driving and presents you with a list of tasks every day. At first you feel a vague prickle of resentment that he seems to be treating the time like a holiday. After a few days you realise it is deliberate: Chen is accepting boredom so you can stay busy.
Sixty Seconds Page 9
