by Daniel Mason
When I turn up at Spencer’s place in Mosman he doesn’t seem particularly surprised to see me there. He doesn’t notice, or pretends he doesn’t notice, the flecks of blood on my jacket and cheek. He and I are like bruised brothers, sporting stitched wounds across our faces and hands.
He opens the door and grins when he sees me and says, ‘My castle is your castle.’
It isn’t so much a castle as it is a house in the suburbs, with a neat front lawn and a double garage and a nice backyard. I’ve never been here before. It’s got three bedrooms but two of them are used to store most of Spencer’s equipment. There’s a shed in the backyard where he fashions surfboards sometimes, but he tells me he hasn’t made a board in a couple of years.
He’s been living here for five years, and his girlfriend has lived with him for three.
Spencer’s girlfriend is Sophia. She has an eating disorder, and during the first week of my living at Spencer’s she says to me, one day when we’re home alone, she says, ‘My nose is bleeding again.’ She says this with a voice full of surprise, like she can’t believe this is her fifth nosebleed in a week. She’s standing there in the doorway, pencil-thin in her ragged denim jeans and sleeveless top, holding her nose as the blood drips along her wrist.
I tell her it’s due to dramatic weight loss.
She says she hasn’t lost any weight this week, her tone defensive and appalled.
I say, ‘You lost your dinner in the bathroom last night. I heard it.’ I proceed to make gagging sounds and she turns away and won’t have anything to do with me for the rest of the day.
Sophia is home all day. She’ll cook dinner for Spencer but often won’t eat it herself. She’s a vegetarian, though she prefers to eat nothing at all. Her diet is cigarettes.
When we’re sitting at home watching television and smoking cigarettes, Spencer is leaping out of planes. I ask Sophia, ‘What do you do for fun?’
She says, ‘What do you mean?’
I say, ‘Well, do you jump out of airplanes?’
She raises her eyes in disbelief. ‘Do you think I’m fucking stupid?’
I’m tempted to tell her that, yes, I do.
I’m tempted to tell her that I can’t quite fathom what Spencer sees in her.
I’m tempted to ask her if she’s ever played a game of Russian roulette, and if she feels like playing one right now.
Throughout the week, Spencer comes home and talks about the coming jump this weekend. Cliffs, waterfalls, valleys. He tells me about the rush. He tells me that he wants to teach me how to skydive, like really dive. He tells me what it’s like to share a moment with the world.
He rolls joints and tells me that anybody who can’t embrace their fear is living with their eyes closed. When I tell him one night that Sophia is a real bitch he says, ‘Yeah, I know. But when I’m up there she doesn’t even exist. Nothing does but me.’
I feel like suggesting that she’ll still be here when he lands. But I don’t.
Spencer and I remove our stitches together with a small pair of scissors, carefully cutting around each other’s scars, pulling the thread through tiny tickling holes. The wounds haven’t healed entirely and there’s a danger they’ll reopen, but Spencer tells me his stitches are itching and he doesn’t want to pull them out on his own.
In the morning I ask Sophia if I can borrow her car, because I’m sick of listening to the sounds of her gagging in the bathroom every time she feels like a snack throughout the day.
Even though I don’t have an international driver’s licence I take her car and go into the city, and when I have to pay a toll on the bridge I drop some bullets into the machine thinking they’re coins. In the city itself I park in one of those four-storey undercover parking complexes and it costs me three dollars, and this time I remember to pay in coins.
I’m beginning to get comfortable in this country, and that’s what bugs me. It’s a mistake to sit in one place for too long. It’s easier to be noticed. Might as well give myself away.
Under my breath I’m cursing as I walk the city streets alone, and it’s like I’m searching for something again but I can’t be sure what, and all the while I’m tearing from the walls posters sporting a likeness of my face. Wanted for heinous crimes against humanity.
I open my eyes. I wake up and I’m talking to a man who tells me he’s Jesus. No kidding, he’s telling me that he’s the Saviour. He looks the part: emaciated, bearded, barefoot and dressed in rags. His eyes are brown and big like walnuts. There’s dried blood under his fingernails.
He’s smoking a cigarette, and all I can focus on is the blood around his fingernails, peeling back in flakes. I’m watching his hand lift the cigarette to his mouth, his dry lips puckered, his cheeks sinking in as he draws, the smoke lingering around his open mouth as he pulls the cigarette away, the blood under his fingernails. He holds the cigarette loosely between his first two fingers, and the action is utterly casual as he lifts, draws a breath of smoke, pulls away, holds, exhales.
He’s sitting cross-legged on a towel. I’m looking up at him and he’s all that fills my vision, Jesus sitting on a towel and smoking a cigarette, the sky behind him the brightest of blues. Somewhere in the distance I hear the sound of waves rolling in against a shore, children calling, gulls cawing. I’ve fallen asleep sunbaking on the beach.
Jesus puts his cigarette out in the sand, and he’s saying, ‘There’s this bloke on a plane, and he’s seated next to the Pope, of all people. The whole flight, this bloke is sitting there, and he’s afraid to move, afraid to speak, scared he’s going to fart or somehow embarrass the Pope. Anyway, about halfway through the flight, the Pope starts doing this crossword. The bloke is sitting there peering over as His Holiness does the crossword, right?
‘Eventually, the Pope turns to him and he says, “Excuse me, but would you know a four-letter word, referring to a woman, that ends in unt?”
‘This bloke, he’s thinking fuck. I can’t say that to the Pope. The bloke thinks long and hard about it, because he doesn’t want to offend the Pope, you know. He really racks his fuckin’ brain thinking this one over, trying to come up with an alternate answer to the one that first popped into his head. And then he says, “Well, of course, the answer must be aunt.”
‘And the Pope slaps himself on the forehead. “Of course,” he says. “Um, you wouldn’t happen to have an eraser, would you?”’
Jesus is laughing, and I shut my eyes again, and I can feel the sun pressing against my eyelids, swirling red-black shapes over my vision. Somewhere, somebody starts screaming.
I don’t open my eyes. I’m calmly asking Jesus, ‘What was that?’
My fingers are laced together and my hands are resting on my stomach, which rises and falls gently with each breath.
Jesus says, ‘Shark attack.’
I give a calm nod, and then I’m opening my eyes to the harsh sunlight again. I’m staring up into the face of Jesus, and he’s staring serenely back at me.
He says, ‘You got a cigarette?’
I ask, ‘Are you really the Son of God?’
He gives me a smile and then he says, ‘Of course not. I’m just a derelict beach bum. I’m crazier than you are, boy.’ He’s laughing again, and he starts twitching. I can see right into his open mouth, at his rotten teeth. His spittle flies and lands on my chest.
I close my eyes again.
For the next jump I’m ground crew again, because the BASE jumping community won’t allow an amateur to jump like this. If there’s a casualty their sport comes under fire. They really don’t allow outsider involvement.
My sport is all about outsider involvement. Russian roulette is always losing its veterans. It’s all about new blood. But I’m not even interested in three-quarters of potential opponents I come across anymore. I need a worthy opponent. It’s not worth risking your life on somebody who’s just going to waste their own. I really need to get inside the head of somebody who understands the game. I need to beat them in their mind at t
he same time as they put a bullet into it.
This weekend the jump site is a two-hour drive north of Sydney, in a place where wide-laned highways snake along bridges through steep cuttings and over giant lakes. Here the fall is less than five hundred feet, and Spencer is going solo.
I am watching from a place near the landing zone this time. It’s a cool day and the wind has left Spencer in doubt about the safety of conditions, though he says the jump is ‘doable’. Everybody seems to trust his judgement on this. It’s clear that Spencer is elevated to the status of a god among these people. It’s like one day he descended from the heavens on a golden parachute and they bowed before him, in awe.
His jump is flawless and over in what seems a matter of seconds. The wind picks up at the last moment, when he’s hurtling himself off the cliff, arms and legs spread wide, and down below there is some speculation about whether Spencer has been thrown against the cliff-face. These doubters are cast into the pits of hell by the believers.
The landing is accurate, within three feet of the marked spot on the ground.
When he lands he is panting like he’s just been for a run. He grins up at me where he’s sitting with his legs splayed in the grass, chute ruffled by the breeze behind him.
He says to me, ‘You’re itchin’, I can tell it.’
I turn away and smoke my cigarette, watching the sun reflecting on the water.
Spencer and the others head back to the city to party, and I stay here with Juliet in a picnic spot and we eat lunch, sandwiches she made before we left. There’s a silence between us, not because we don’t have anything to talk about, but just because we don’t want to talk. I can hear the chewing of her food next to me, and each deep exhale of her breath.
Juliet breaks the silence by saying, ‘Next month I’ll be twenty-five. Can you believe it?’
‘Almost,’ I say, looking her in the face, at the freckles and the slight wrinkles at the corner of her eyes. A lifetime of exposure to the sun and the elements shows her true age. I explain to her that while oxygen gives life it also corrodes healthy cells in the human body via free radicals. I have to explain that these aren’t the kind of people who protested during the Sixties. Free radicals are a product of oxygen, like oxidants. I explain that it’s the action of these oxidants on our cell structure that causes us to age. This is all stuff I read in a magazine.
She’s impressed with my knowledge and I light a cigarette in triumph, immediately earning her disapproval. She continues her musing on age. ‘My parents were married when they were twenty-four. Spencer was born when they were twenty-five. I just can’t imagine being married.’
I tell her, ‘I used to be married.’
The shock registers on her face and for a moment she looks younger than she feels. One eyebrow is raised higher than the other, on a steeper angle. ‘You’re kidding?’ She realises that I’m not. ‘You were married? When? What happened?’
Her surprise and sudden line of questioning are out of character. She feels like she knows me, even when she doesn’t, and this is why the revelation shocks her.
I say, ‘I was still married eighteen months ago. She died.’ There is no hint of sadness in my voice. No lingering memories of the good times I had shared with my dearly departed.
Juliet says, ‘My God, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.’
Why would she have any idea if I’d not mentioned it before?
I say, ‘It’s nothing to be sorry for. You aren’t the one who cut her.’
Juliet asks, ‘What? Cut her? Who cut her?’
I say, ‘She did, actually.’ I mimic the action of slitting both of my wrists, up not across.
People expect you to be sad when you tell them that your wife is dead. They don’t expect you to reveal the story in such a cold and clinical fashion. I should know. I won’t stoop to dramatising the situation. I tell it like it is. She killed herself.
Juliet says, ‘That’s so terrible.’
I shrug.
Though it’s not a particularly hot day we end up swimming in the lake. It must be half a mile across and Juliet challenges me to a race across the other side. I’ve heard people tell me that drowning is like bliss, so I accept.
The water is cool and dirty, the surface covered with flecks of something I can’t identify. There are a lot of leaves on the water, fallen from trees close to the shore. When I cup the water in my hands it seems tinted with yellow, like piss.
Juliet is definitely a swimmer. Her mother raised her in the water as a child, the same way that Spencer raised her in the air as a teenager. Her mother had been a champion swimmer in her youth until a car accident left her with chronic back problems. Juliet’s parents divorced when she was fifteen and she stayed with her mother. She never saw much of her father after that. He remarried, started another family. Juliet resented him for it. Spencer had his own place and she spent a lot of time there, hanging around with the older boys. Spencer never treated her like she was just his little sister.
In the water, Juliet moves swiftly across the surface and seemingly without effort.
As a counter to Juliet’s grace, I swim clumsily, my limbs feeling like weights, the blood pounding in my ears and behind my eyes. By the time I’m halfway across the lake my lungs feel as if I’m drawing fog instead of clear air.
I collapse on the muddy shore at the other side, and staring back across the lake the distance to our car looks so much shorter than it feels in every joint of my body. Juliet is breathing easy. Her cheeks are flushed and she gives me a mischievous smile as she treads water in the shallows. I can barely speak from exhaustion, and I certainly don’t look forward to the return journey. I could fall asleep on the shore.
The sky has come over with dark clouds, their bellies heavy with rain. We’re silent as we regain our energies and sit in the water, and the scent of rain is heavy in the air even before it begins to fall. Soon we can’t see the other shoreline.
The water around us suddenly gains warmth in comparison to the downpour.
Swimming back, with no idea of our actual direction, I am thinking about sharks. A tributary doesn’t feed this lake so there’s no chance of an attack, but I imagine fins slicing through the misty rain all the same. The surface of the water dances with each raindrop, like thousands of tiny mouths opening to the sky. I swim with my head above the water, breaststroke. I’m taking my time and soon I lose Juliet as she swims away through the fine curtain of water.
I imagine I could remain out here treading water for a long time before I grow tired and sink. At the bottom I’ll sit in the mud with the weeds and rocks, a statue in a fishbowl.
When we reach the shore our clothes have been soaked by the rain where we left them. We sit together in the car with the heater on, drying, not talking. Juliet is beginning to look like a little girl, huddled and wet in the driver’s seat.
After a while she says, ‘It’s funny the way life fucks with your plans. I mean, you were married, you probably wanted a nice house and a family and everything. But here you are.’
I tell her that it’s the funniest thing in the world. Real riot material, laugh out loud stuff.
She doesn’t understand how I can laugh about these sorts of things. She’s never had what I would call a defining tragedy in her life.
She suggests that maybe we should head back to the city.
That night I sleep at her place in Newtown and around us the house is silent and dark, rain tapping the windows like fingers trying to find their way inside.
In the newspaper: boy, 17, found dead, execution-style bullet wound to the head, son of a high-powered businessman; advertising executive shot during lunch break; law student murdered; police officer shot and wounded on the beat, comatose and critical; girl, 16, missing for five days, she’s the mayor’s granddaughter.
I read about these actions in the newspapers and the police say there’s a calling card left at the scene of every crime. The culprit calls himself the Jack Of All Trades Killer.
It’s that night, after I’ve been reading the paper at the kitchen table, when Spencer has dragged me out in the city to go clubbing. Sophia won’t come because she’s too fat and can’t fit into any of her clothes.
The club on Park Street is dark and crowded and pulsating with coloured lights. The music is like an external heartbeat. The lights are the kind that latch onto the hip-hugging white pants of shapely women. Cigarettes glow. The ice in our drinks is as reflective as glass.
Spencer says, ‘Sometimes you need to come to a place like this to escape it all. There’s so much assaulting your senses here that it’s easy to forget about the things that matter for a while.’
Anything else that Spencer tells me tonight is lost under the drone of music.
I dislike my senses being clouded and the pressure in my head makes me think I’m suffering a panic attack. I don’t see Spencer anywhere on the dancefloor and I wander outside for some fresh air and a cigarette. This is where I find Jack.
Like the first time we met, he’s dressed entirely in black. His hair has been styled into a series of spikes. He’s alone on the street outside the club, smoking and staring at the sky. At first he doesn’t seem to recognise me, and then he frowns and makes to walk away, like I’m some kind of ghost he can outrun. But he knows there’s no point running, so he stops and says, ‘Hey, man.’
I say, ‘You at the club?’
Jack laughs. ‘You fuckin’ think so? Get real. I’m waiting for someone.’ He adds, ‘As if I’d give these capitalist pigs a penny.’ He tips some pills from a small plastic bottle into his palm. He offers the bottle to me, and I accept it and dry swallow some pills without asking precisely what they are, just to show him that he can trust me.
I say, ‘Been reading about you in the papers.’
He raises an eyebrow. ‘Say what?’
I mimic the action of shooting a pistol, like a cowboy.
‘How about a rematch?’ I suggest. ‘We can go right now. I’m not busy.’
