The morning light casts his skin in a papery hue. Almost transparent. Sometimes I feel as if I can see right into him, that his skin is tracing paper and all I have to do to examine his bones is press the skin up against them. Further inside are his organs, purple and maroon and crimson, shiny kidney bulbs and flaps of liver, the firm steady muscle of his heart. At night I hear his heart. The waves of blood beating through his body, the air whispering in and out of his lungs. He is still asleep when he rolls over and pulls me to him and his dry skin meets my damp hot body, weary from turning and tensing and fretting until even my cells are invaded with coiled strings of worry. He pulls me against his calm body and we enter the deep peaceful slumber that for a few years fell over our land.
Today he will go to the army. The same army that borrowed him for a year in his youth. They will ask him to remember the shape of a rifle in his hands. How to load the shells into a rocket launcher, how to focus his eye through the sights, how to brace his thin shoulder against the recoil of the machine. They are almost upon us, we are told. Knotted voices on the radio warn us to prepare. Our enemies want to destroy our short history of peace, split us apart again. Nothing will ever be the same.
I want to go instead of him. I want to pick up the rifle and press the stock against my cheek as I aim into the heart of my enemy. With my steady grip I would not miss, if only I could be sure who was my enemy and who my friend. I have examined the map of the human body, counted the fifty-four bones of the hands that hold a gun. In my surgery I have opened the mouths of other humans and peered inside, sewn their bleeding wounds into a purse of skin, pressed my fingers against their throats at exactly the point I would insert a knife to kill them. I do not know whether tomorrow those people will forget me, or provide sanctuary, or hunt me down.
He lifts the teapot and fills my cup. White cup, rosy black tea. Thick china. I hold the cup in both hands, my elbows en pointe on the tabletop like a ballet dancer’s feet. The smell of the tea is bitter and even before I taste it I can feel the astringency on my tongue. We have no food here, no milk. The house is almost empty. We will abandon the last of the furniture and the books.
There is a knock at the door. His hand grasps mine across the table for a moment, our bones crushed together, then he rises. He shoulders his bag, his future and his past, the unasked-for weight of our nation’s troubles. He is called by his people, I will seek refuge with mine. We will peel apart, the twin strands of DNA untwisting from the helix.
After the Goths
Before they were even in their bowling shoes, Cody started on the stories. He was talking about back when Dan was fifteen and he was fourteen, and his brother would swoop out of the house at night like a bat in his long black coat and smoky eyeliner. Around dawn, Cody would wake to Dan’s footfalls along the hall and his bedroom door clicking shut, followed by the muffled thump of his clothes hitting the floor.
‘Strike coming up!’ Dan’s girlfriend, Hannah, called out. She chose a pocked maroon bowling ball from the rack and balanced it on her upturned fingers. Standing with her toes on the line at the start of the lane, she swung her arm back and threw the ball. It bounced twice on the wooden floor before slumping into the gutter. Above their heads a cartoon figure popped up on the video screen and shouted, ‘Bummer!’
Cody had a plastic bag with a change of clothes sitting beside the bench. His ticket and passport were in his pocket and his luggage was in Dan’s car. In six hours he would be taking off to America.
‘Did you ever wear the Man Skirt?’ Cody asked Dan loudly. He turned to Hannah and his own date. ‘I saw it in his room. A symbol of our faith and our deviancy, the label said. It had a “discreet zip fly” in the front,’ he said, rolling his eyes and making exaggerated quote marks with his fingers.
Cody told the Goth stories more often than he should, but he knew they would always get a laugh. And those days were still so vivid to him, ten years later, that he could almost smell Dan’s clove hair oil and the sweet scented wax of the candles burning in his room.
‘It was a bit of fun. Not a big deal.’ Dan spoke in a murmur directed at Cody.
Cody couldn’t stop.
‘What about the vibrating tongue ring? I always wondered which lucky girl you tried that on. Was it the fat one who used to recite death poetry in your room?’
Dan kept staring at the bowlers in the next lane as he sipped his beer.
Cody needed to say one more thing, and he needed to say it tonight, before he went away.
‘She died the next year,’ he told the girls. ‘The fat one. She offed herself.’
‘Oh my God,’ Hannah whispered. ‘How did she do it?’
‘Whoa,’ Cody’s date said. She opened her mouth as if to go on, but closed it again. After a moment, she walked to the ball return rack and picked up bowling balls one after another, testing their weight, while the others kept talking.
‘Wrists,’ Dan said. ‘Do we have to talk about this?’
‘How old was she?’ Hannah asked.
‘I really would rather talk about something else,’ Dan said.
‘Okay, sorry.’ Cody pulled his wallet from his back pocket and checked the notes. He asked if anyone else wanted hot chips, then went to the food counter and watched the girl shovel chips from the bain marie into a cardboard cup. She had black painted fingernails and a thin plastic serving glove on one hand. The nail of her index finger, filed to a sharp point, had pierced the end of the glove. It seemed like everything here was meant to remind him of Dan and the Goths.
The video screen was blaring out an old-fashioned marching tune when Cody got back to the lane.
‘You should have seen Dan’s fingernails,’ Cody told the girls. ‘There’s a girl at the counter with nails like he used to have. His were much longer though. They were painted black but the polish would peel off like sunburn, and they clicked against each other when he tried to hold the cutlery. After a while he gave up. He picked up pieces of food in his claws and dropped them into his mouth like he was feeding a seal. My dad called him The Vampire.’
He kept going, describing Dan’s friends, the hangers-on, who called him Daniel, but pronounced it Daarniel. They used to clank as they walked with their dull metal jewellery and buckles and ornamental zips weighing them down. In summer the black clothes must have been stifling, but they never wore another colour.
Often Dan wouldn’t come home for meals at all, but when he did arrive he would sit opposite Cody at the dinner table, pale and hacking away at the cough he had acquired from smoking thin black cigarillos. Their father would ask Dan how school was going.
‘Fine.’
‘Still topping the maths? I don’t know where you two boys got that gene from. Your mother and I can barely add one and one!’
‘Back then,’ Cody leaned over and said to Hannah while his date stared at the pins, preparing to bowl, ‘Dan’s hair was halfway down his back and he spent hours washing and conditioning it. I could never get into the bathroom. Even Mum complained. He had more make-up in the bathroom cupboard than she did.’
‘Cody,’ Dan said, ‘that’s enough, mate. It’s your turn. Let’s bowl, okay?’
Cody strolled down to the head of the lane and balanced the ball in both hands, mimicking the stance he’d seen people take on American TV shows. Then he backed up ten paces, swung the ball in an arc behind, and slid his feet down the runway to the lane, making sure that when he released the ball his left knee was bent low and his right foot pushed back and to the side for balance.
‘Dude!’ the video screen shouted, and a lairy tune burst from the speakers under the bench. ‘Steeerike!’
‘Hey, Dan,’ Cody said when the commotion had died down, ‘couldn’t do that in a Man Skirt, eh?’
‘What is it with you?’ Dan’s voice rose slightly. ‘You can’t let things go. You should try on a bit of make-up yourself, mate. Maybe you’d loosen u
p.’
In the next lane a girl bowled a strike and the winner’s tune rang out again. Her friends screamed. The pack of girls milled around the lane, their glittery low-cut tops shimmering in the video light.
Cody had tried on Dan’s make-up once. He caked on the white foundation and black eyeliner and watched himself from the corner of his eye in the mirror as he poked around Dan’s room. He found condoms and crystals and small plastic packets with traces of white powder. Cocaine? But Cody was afraid to rub the powder against his gums like they did on television, in case it was something else, some Goth poison. He found black candles, a test tube with a crust of dried red liquid, bits of bone and fur and hair tucked into a jar.
Downstairs, later that evening, Cody told his mother that Dan was performing satanic rituals in his room. She tried to hug Cody and tousle his hair.
‘Dan’s going through a difficult time,’ she said. ‘And soon you’ll be going through it too. Let him be, hmm?’
‘I’ll never do that dress-up stuff.’
‘No, I guess you won’t, sweetie,’ she said. ‘But there’ll be something, you’ll see.’
One of the things Cody found in Dan’s room was a poem by the fat girl, written out in big loopy handwriting. He had heard her through the wall a few nights before, reading it aloud to Dan. After she finished the poem there was a long silence, when Cody wondered if they were kissing.
‘Wow,’ Dan had said finally. ‘Heavy poem.’
Cody hid the poem and a few other things he had taken from Dan’s room in a box at the back of his wardrobe.
Dan failed school that year. The week before classes started again, he threw out his make-up and his jewellery, sold the big coat to a kid down the road and cut off his hair.
Dan’s repeating meant that he and Cody were in the same class. They sat at opposite ends of the classroom. For the first month of term, Dan’s Goth friends floated past the classroom window staring in at him, trying to attract his attention without showing any of the life or enthusiasm that might ruin their image. The teacher made mock-tragic faces at the class and they giggled while Dan flushed pink. He never acknowledged his old friends in their black clothes and soon there were no more Goths in the school. His group, once they had shed their make-up and costumes, blended back so smoothly into the school population that the whole Goth thing might never have happened.
After Dan’s friends took off the Goth clothes, the fat girl was the only one Cody kept thinking about. She was not hugely fat, only plump, with big thighs and breasts. She carried her fat in a defiant way. Her favourite clothes were tight short skirts and chunky shoes. When they passed in the corridor she stared at Cody, daring him to acknowledge her. So he did, even though he preferred to avoid Dan’s friends. He gave her the slightest of nods. More an upward tilt of the head than a nod.
Another day she asked Cody if he knew what they were supposed to be doing for biology homework.
‘Dunno.’
‘My name’s Jenny,’ she said.
He gave her the head tilt and walked away. He knew her name.
She still came around to visit Dan for a while after the Goth time. Cody could hear them murmuring through the wall but they had music playing and he couldn’t make out what they were saying. In the long silences when the murmuring stopped, Cody lay on his bed and imagined Dan putting his hand up the girl’s short skirt and tugging down the white undies Cody had seen when she bent over at school. He could picture Dan’s hands on the girl’s breasts, her big round breasts, kneading them and pushing them, his tongue in her mouth.
Halfway through the year, Jenny stopped visiting Dan. But she’d still stare at Cody at school and he’d still give her the tilt, until one day they ended up sitting together at lunch and they swapped a mandarin and an apple.
‘Hey, Cody, over here,’ Hannah called from the back of the bowling lane. She pressed her finger on the electronic scoring screen.
‘Look. The scores aren’t right. Did, um, did your friend miss a turn?’ She whispered in Cody’s ear, ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve forgotten her name. Say it next time you talk to her.’
Cody’s friend was from his work. It was only when she arrived at the bowling alley that she realised it was a date.
‘Where is everyone?’ she’d asked as Dan and Hannah went off to hire shoes. When Cody told her she was the only one from work invited, she had sucked her lower lip for a moment, and said, ‘But aren’t you going away for a year?’
And now, when Cody turned to say her name, he was too late. She was already busy at the counter, changing into her outdoor shoes. She came back to pick up her handbag.
‘Thanks for the game and everything, and good luck on your trip. I don’t … I … Yeah, anyway, have fun.’
Aware that Dan was watching, Cody leaned down to kiss her goodbye, but she ducked and stepped off. Her dark hair swung like a metronome as she walked away. Her buttocks were two high sexy mounds pushing up and out in turn with each step. At the door she turned and waved once.
Cody stood watching the automatic door that had closed behind her. ‘She reminds me of that girl from school we were talking about. Dan, doesn’t she remind you of her?’
‘Not the one who died? Was she your girlfriend?’ Hannah touched Dan’s arm.
‘No, she was a friend. It was Cody who went out with her.’
‘Not really,’ Cody said quickly. ‘We just did it a couple of times, you know, like you do in high school.’ He kept staring at the door, wondering if he’d ever see his date again.
‘What was that Goth girl’s name again?’ Dan said. His look at Cody went on and on like a mile-long freight train in the outback, loaded up with enough stuff for ten towns. Cody felt himself start to redden.
‘Can’t remember. Hey, Hannah, come on, it’s your turn.’
When she was out of earshot, Dan turned to Cody. ‘Yes, you can.’
Hannah bowled a strike. She screamed and ran halfway up the lane and back again and the attendant saw her and spoke over the PA: ‘Please stay off the lanes. Off the lanes.’
Cody watched her run back to Dan, fling herself on the bench beside him and kiss him on the mouth.
When Dan had taken off his Goth costume, the hard, superior shell fell away from him. Their mother had said to Cody, ‘See, I told you he’d get over this silly phase. I suppose it’ll be your turn next.’ But Cody never had a phase. He waited to feel something different in himself, but nothing seemed to change.
The next time Hannah went to get drinks, Dan said to Cody, ‘Look, I think it’s really good you’re going on this trip. You can relax, have a laugh. That Goth stuff, mate, I’m so sick of hearing about it.’
‘I did try on your make-up, you know.’
‘Cody, are you listening at all? I don’t care.’
‘That girl told me she was going to kill herself. I’d fucked her twice and I told her to piss off. I didn’t believe her.’
‘Is that what this is about? She told us all a hundred times she was going to kill herself. None of us believed her.’
‘I just do the Goth jokes to make people laugh. I’ll stop, okay?’
‘Cody, it was ten years ago. Let it go.’
‘I have let it go,’ Cody said, frowning.
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘I know that.’
Hannah had brought back beers and she stood beside them, slopping dregs on her shoes.
‘Anyway,’ Dan said, ‘no one could have stopped her.’
When they finished the round of bowling, Cody gathered his things. Hannah drove. They sat in silence as the car sped down the garishly lit freeway to the airport.
‘It’ll be brilliant, mate,’ Dan said, slapping Cody on the back as he headed toward passport control. ‘Take care. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’
Cody remembered how his face had looked i
n Dan’s make-up. He had seen his blackened eyes and white face in the mirror and hardly recognised himself. He’d imagined going out to a club and being someone else, just for one night, but the thought scared him and he had washed away the make-up so quickly that the soap got into his eyes and his mother asked if he’d been crying.
At last his plane was on the runway. It began to pick up speed. Cody felt his body being pressed gently into the back of the seat.
‘Jenny,’ he said.
The passenger in the next seat shifted to face away from him and leaned her head against the shuddering wall of the aeroplane.
Family Reunion
There was a party when I first came to this country. The table was heavy with plates of pizza and chicken balls and Turkish dips with sticks of celery that no one touched. Balloons clustered on the ceiling, trying to escape the heat of the room. A badly lit fire in the fireplace sent out curls of woody smoke, and a heater with two red coils sat burning in the opposite corner.
‘This is my Filipino brother-in-law, Enrico,’ Alan said each time he introduced me. At that point, the person I was meeting would clap my shoulder. ‘Welcome to Australia!’ As if they had all rehearsed this gesture in preparation for my arrival.
‘I told everyone all about you,’ my sister said the first night, before the party, before the bad feeling entered the house and hung around like the shrivelled party balloons that her husband keeps forgetting to take down. She said this in English, loudly, so that he would hear from the next room.
‘I told them how you used to call me Bibby, and how sad you were when I had to go to another country to find work. You cried on the phone and begged me, “Bibby, please come home.” And I had to tell you to get off the phone and put Mama on the line, that Mr Kelly was paying for me to call from Hong Kong and he would be angry at a little boy in the Philippines wasting his money.’
Peripheral Vision Page 6
