Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 6, Issue 5

by Alex Miller

  She sits up and breathes, re-centring herself, locating herself to a point. Taking a mango from the paper bag, she peels it, wiping her hand on her delicate floral handkerchief that she has taken from her pocket and released from its fold. She takes a generous mouthful of mango, her teeth and lips working together, encasing the softness, its flesh, and her tongue taking it all in. Her throat responding like a cunt, opening and welcoming the pungency—excited by its wholesomeness. It slides down her insides. The gloriousness of it! Sweetness riding the threshold of brilliance and rot, melting away in migration through the interior of her body. Once she can feel it in her stomach she takes in more. She rides the line of life and death—of ripeness and decay—of beauty and rot. A fragile line, a line that seeps and creeps. Beauty creeping to rot and rot seeping back to beauty. And it is alive in her mouth. A composition. Decomposition. And it is beautiful.

  She places the peel in the paper bag and lies down again. Ah, her children! Her youngest son’s calmness, her daughter’s clean body and innocent edge. This weekend she is going to clean out the garage to create a studio for her. She has the unruly dark curls of her grandmother and Anna’s sharp face. Anna has not discussed the garage arrangement with her husband. And she won’t. She has begun to just do things and suffer the lecture afterwards. She longs for weekends working the communal vegetable patch, watching her daughter creating through the tiny window of the garage.

  She does not know that as her thoughts shift to Rueben, he is in the school gymnasium, mastering the crucifix, suspended in his own strength, caught in the geometry of his body and the apparatus. Only recently, she stumbled by accident on a notebook of equations he had written to his girlfriend. She found it tucked under the edge of his mattress, while she was tidying his room, and thought little of it, opening it up as she took a rest, sitting on the sagging edge of his bed. As she skimmed over the first page she realised that it was a love letter—the only type he could have written. Like a trespasser she quickly placed it back, carefully returning it to exactly where she had found it. She dutifully reprimanded herself for looking at it in the first place. It was then, however, that she knew he was a poet that she does not understand, and she respects him even the more for not being able to understand him. She lies back down, into the soft mattress of grass, remembering him this morning. Allowing her to hug and kiss him goodbye at the school gate. For accepting that the ritual was for her alone, that he would endure such things for her, for Anna.

  With such proud thoughts of her children filling her with goodness, the tentacles of anxious nausea slowly unfurl. She stands and stretches, the paper bag scrunched in her hand, holds the mango peel. Picking up the rest of her things, she begins down the path to the other end of the gardens, towards home. Despite it being late afternoon, her head is without weight and she is prepared for the night. She wants to see her children right now, to hug them, hold them, breathe them in and give them what they need for the night.

  Trying not to give more—that is the key. This is her life and she is light with happiness.

  She walks up the terrazzo staircase to her third-floor apartment. Each step an incremental increase in temperature. She approaches the front door of her apartment and fumbles for the shiny red key, the muffled sound of a Chopin nocturne muted by the heavy closed door. As she turns the lock she imagines the elegant arrangement of her daughter’s fingers on the regimented keys of the piano.

  She swings open the door, with an unnecessary gust of energy, the music hitting her with its fullness that simultaneously clashes and harmonises with the sound of her son’s heavy metal, muffled through his closed bedroom door. Her daughter, at home with the calamity and chaos that is family life, persists happily through her late afternoon practice, looking up only to give her mother a reassuring half smile. Anna smiles back, raising her eyebrows and tilting her head in a way that translates to her daughter that the nocturne is ‘pretty fucking good’. No one seems to notice the heat but her. Her youngest son is sitting on the rug, busily playing with his matchbox cars and Lego. In the space of an hour he has created a matchbox car city, complete with its deranged Barbie doll, naked and trapped, in a colourful tower in the centre. He finishes the circuit with the red matchbox and then races over to his mother, wrapping his arms around her legs and burying his face in the paisley fabric of her dress. She awkwardly places her bags on the clean floorboards and kneels down to him, cupping his face in her hand and kissing him several times on his forehead, breathing him in while eyeing the miniature perfection of Barbie’s forever smiling face.

  The night unwraps itself calmly. She has ticked all the boxes today and this is her reward—a peaceful night of steady, quiet joy. Her husband who arrived home only minutes after her is taking his time in the shower, washing away the office. Now, it’s nearly seven o’clock and her two eldest children are in their rooms, completing their homework, and her son is resuming command of his Lego kingdom. And in this steady way, the moments, the night, her life, progress...

  After the chicken and the conversation, the napkins and gnawed cartilage, the dishes and the folded laundry, after teeth are cleaned, children bathed and their hair brushed, after the coolness of night has driven off the heat of the day and clean bodies slip themselves into clean pyjamas, Anna fills the kettle one last time. She places it on the stove and waits for it to sound its unruly explosion, but it doesn’t come.

  In the silent footsteps of time, the night turns quickly into itself. Anna feels the coolness reach her body, seeping in and bringing relief. H is in his gentle composure that he reserves only for the night. She sits in her mother’s wingback, cradling her grandmother’s teacup, hot with coffee, with both her hands as though she’s just received the holy communion and won’t give it back. She looks out to the darkness through the window, it’s almost impossible to make out the dried smear of blood. No one had noticed it. She’ll remember to wake up early and wash it away before the children wake.

  H comes up behind her and leans into the back of the chair, taking her shoulders in his hands, his long fingers working softness into the hard strap of muscle that is wrapped around her shoulders. She closes her eyes and focuses on the grit of the strong coffee in the back of her throat before swallowing hard. She thinks about the lovers she saw earlier, knocking back tequila and oysters in midmorning carelessness. And she thinks of the woman’s song, the gorgeously rotting mango, the mad woman in her wheelchair, forever cradled in her madness. She thinks too of the fat woman about to burst in her freshly pressed lady rose uniform. The pungency of it all, the toxicity of it all, that great surge and retreat that is life. She cries the outside-in, great waves of colour swell within her, to the rhythm of her husband’s caress. A composition. Decomposition. And it is beautiful.

  An hour later she stands over his body with the authority of a theatre nurse, before pulling up her nightdress and straddling his slim, pale body. She loves him, but still she expels him with each breath. Her cunt, nestling him and feeding on him before spewing him out in rhythmic cycle, receiving and expelling, his body, obedient and submissive, prey to this generous act of woman. The rhythm eating into desire, propelling it forward and cutting movement to begin again, over and over, drawing in something beyond the space of their bodies. Drawing in the entirety of ancient longing and pleasure, of ritual. She closes her eyes and there is the sea. The rhythmic waves becoming her body’s movements. Working to a silent crescendo, she moves with greater certainty until his presence is washed away. Losing his body to the space of her own pleasure. Letting him go for the sake of poetry. Her own poetry. A poetry not of lines, meter or words, but the poetry that always overruns, overflows. Pressing the rich belly inside out. The song that surges forth, that cascades over the pieces of its whole like a tsunami. Her body coming. We are the mothers of poetry, she whispers into herself, feeding herself forward as she clenches her thighs and rises high, high, higher.

  Lover,

  When I close my eyes, I see your lips move. We�
��re talking on the phone and you ask me if you can touch yourself and I say yes. I say it quietly and without delay and I feel powerful because I have surprised you. What you don’t know is that I touch myself as well, but I do not seek your permission. I take it and hold onto it. We fall and rise and fall together.

  Then there was the night we sat together on your bed. Full of substance, with only the recording of a lone drummer as background. You told me not to come any closer, so I looked into you, beyond eye and nerve and blood. I ran my fingertip along the steep ridge of my collarbone and pushed the thin strap from my shoulder. I unevenly circled my nipple, before pulling my dress over my head—the chiffon mushrooming beside my thigh, on your unmade bed. One of my hands rested on my leg as the other traced the contours of my body, slowly and smoothly riding the lines of hip and valley and plain. The moon outside your window was full and the air was no temperature at all. Equilibrium. Bodies, air, breath. When I closed my eyes it was impossible to tell where my body ended, for the space around me and your body too, had become an extension of my own. Both of us, sitting apart. A single figure. We were held in that peace of stillness—a rare silence that catches you in its gentle clutch. An entire pause, but for pulse and nerves, breath and blood. As though the outside were etherised. My body working into itself—returning to its nucleus. And always, the moon was faithful and full, outside your window.

  It was as though we reclaimed youth: that great collection of accidents. Inhibition stunned by desire. The drummer in the background, his offbeat brilliance—

  All the while we stared deep into each other and it was not until I reached into my cunt that you undressed, hastily, as though you could lose your chance—you saw the end and you bolted.

  Your eagerness unnerved me. I saw it as immature. It splintered our meeting point and dampened the energy between our bodies. But still, I continued, though my limbs had returned to their reach and the air slowly began to redefine itself against my skin.

  matter anti-matter and we annihilate each other

  And then one day, it ended. There was no warning, no explanation. Just the stonewall of silence that rebounded everything Anna threw at it. Finally she came to that point where there’s nothing left to do but take each piece of emotion and extension and slowly and painfully tuck them back in and zip herself shut for good measure. She faced the mirror with pursed lips and recounted her flaws. Pinching her thigh with her forefinger and thumb to stop the tears, she vowed never to get lost to Foolishness again. Still, such a promise did little to lift the brick that had lodged in her stomach. And so, every morning, while her husband showered, she burned myrrh and leant into the smoke, her hands encouraging it to her senses. And she repeated to herself, the smoke billowing onto her face, that she would Overcome. That she would Overcome. Overcome, breathing softness back to her lips.

  Years later, there will come a time when she will cradle the hysterical face, just like her own but a generation younger, and she will want to retch, as she remembers this brutal void. Because the most painful ends are the ones that demand Nothing. Ritual suspended in the torture of silence. And we disintegrate into our nucleus.

  (I) lie next to H, listening to his body recovering from its shudder, recoiling back into itself, calmly, quietly, nestling into sleep. (I) am wide awake, waiting. Waiting for some thought to grip (me) and propel (me) forward for the new day. Waiting for the same calm and peace that drenches H, as he lies hollow in his fragile faith next to (me). Waiting for the soft rhythm of thud thud thud to come needing and wanting to (my) bedside. Waiting for the lethargy of (my) days to pass, for the mania to calm down, for the restlessness to stop. Waiting to be loved and to love in colourful circles of passion. Waiting for the coffee to rise up in a torrent of indigestion. Waiting for the drunks to begin their crooked walk home. Waiting for the madwoman across the street to chant from her bedroom window that the pigs are coming, coming, always coming.

  But it is still, ghostly still, and the heavy curtains, made with (my) own capable hands, let in none of the light. My heartbeat reverberates at the back of (my) throat and (my) legs twitch from deep within (my) cunt to the tips of (my) toes. (I) want to pull the curtains open and lift the great, century old, double hung windows and sit on the ledge, the threshold, and smoke a cigarette. Sucking it in and feeling it, harsh against the back of my throat and down the funnel of my oesophagus, before expelling a line of spent smoke over the city.

  Instead, (I) hold in (my) body’s thin, trained line, disciplining the sudden jerks of (my) legs. Tucking (myself) in. TIGHT! And this is how (I) pass the moments before sleep. It is not until (I) finally drift off, the strap of muscle around (my) shoulders taut, vision inverting, that the tarantula deems it safe to creep down the narrow journey of the dark corridor. Instinctively knowing the way to (my) bedside. Creeping along the cotton landscape of grandmother’s quilt. Finding (me) again, just as (I) am everyothernight. Deftly confident. Creeping, creeping, creeping up the base of my neck. Creeping, creeping, creeping over the crest of (my) skull—until it finds the tender ridge above (my) left eye.

  But (I) dodge it—(I) dip down low without disturbing muscle or breath. (I) hold myself in so tight that (I) invert, claimed in retreat before I pushe back through myself—a full bloom pushing through its own bloom. Eyes dart open, they are mine and they see through the darkness. This moment has never been far away. Waiting on the other side of a decision. H stirs when I press my lips to his forehead, as though I gently disturb his dream. Taking my slip and dressing gown from the chair I dress quickly. I am in a great hurry. I fumble in the cupboard, feeling my way through embroidered lace and layers of memory and find the box. With determined steps I walk down the hall to the kitchen. But my footsteps are light. This is a quiet revolution. I flick on the light switch, fill the kettle and light the stove. I prepare the plunger with fresh coffee. I open the fridge and fill the small jug with milk. I open the back door and pour out some of my milk on a small dish leaving it just inside the doorway. Stray is welcome here. But what can I write on? The small notepad I use for the daily shopping list is too small. Etta has left her artist’s sketchpad on the table. I’ll take some pages from the back. If I write small I can write for miles, and maybe I will just keep writing, even if I run out of space, words over words over words over words over... I’ll know when I’m done because there will only be blackness. But what to write with? There are sharpened pencils but I want something more definite. I want my mistakes. They are mine. I will use Etta’s felt-tip. That just seems right. Felt—Tip. The kettle is gently whistling. There’s no need for little explosions now. Stray has come in and laps up the milk. The coffee is brewing and I arrange everything I need on the table, the wooden box of letters sits above my paper. A self-sufficient circle of basic needs to see me through the night. Stray has finished her milk and ventures further in, weaving her glorious filthy body through my ankles. But, where do I begin? And what shall I call her? Not my own name, that’s just for me. I know. She will have my mother’s name. Anna. Full, empty loop of a name. Nestled between two beginnings, the final one considerably less remarkable than the first, with a couple of identical journeys in between. The name that couldn’t quite obey the old dream of symmetry. I’ll start with a secret. I pour the coffee and forget the milk. There is nothing left but momentum. (I) am here. I am here. The last of H trickles down my leg. And I takes flight.