Loving, Faithful Animal

by Josephine Rowe

  Nothing quite like that will ever happen again, she’s sure—not now, not here. How could it? This long-reaching emptiness, grabbing right into you; nothing beautiful or unlikely could sneak up on you here. You’d see it coming, kicking up dust from miles away, and by the time it got here it would already look spent, secondhand. Only the cruelty is astonishing, only the toxic boredom twisting imaginations just as the wind twists the cypress. The sight of Belle, strewn through the yard … She shivers.

  Before Jack, she’d believed she would always live on the coast, at the lacy green edge of things. Was that so much to want? Evelyn feels dried-out here, older than her forty years. The last time she saw a stingray it was something dreadful, a grotesque little flaunt of exoticism. A woman at the post office carrying a souvenir handbag from Thailand, the ray’s skin dried to hard leather. The white diamond-shaped cluster of tiny, bony pearls where the dorsal fin would be. Had been. Fitting, she thinks now, though the irony escaped her at the time.

  It’s very unique, she’d said to the woman, and the woman—orchestrator of fundraisers for the PTA, CFA, ETC.; Ev couldn’t remember her name—smiled back at her with something like pity.

  Well, a thing’s either unique or it isn’t, she’d said back over her shoulder, then moved up to the counter to collect her package.

  The garage door goes up with a bit of a struggle, a bit of a screech. It’s neater in there than it was this morning, Tetch having wrought a rough sort of order on the chaos. That was in keeping with the natural law of things; Jack busted things up and his brother fixed them. Like a European folktale, something with ravens and black forests and woodsmen.

  Clever with his hands, Tetch. What’s left of them. Does she think about them, his hands, what they would be like? Sometimes. Just curiously. Well, anyone would. She’s never known him to have a woman, but she supposes there must be some things the man keeps to himself, in that warren of broken radios and hurt birds and obsolete encyclopedias. Maybe an awful lot, even in this town. Maybe especially in this town.

  Watching him lope across the lawn this morning, she was struck by just how un-Jack he was.

  Your father, was he more like you or more like …? she’d once started to ask her husband, and then thought better of it. There was no telling. There was never any telling, besides the look he got sometimes. The slight twitch at the side of his mouth. A stiffness to his hands. Palms pressed down flat upon the tabletop. As if he could feel something trembling there in the wood, the way you might lay your hand to a rail line to know whether a train was coming. Or measure the distance of an oncoming storm by the seconds between the thunder and the lightning (or was it the other way around?).

  He’d cock his head as if listening. It chilled her. She could never hear a thing.

  Tetch (Les, she reminds herself, Les) seems fashioned of different stuff. Well he is, really. A different mother—a fling, she must’ve been—who went and got herself shut away over some display of hysterics. Accidentally-on-purpose running the car off the road outside Inverloch, Les just a tiny thing strapped into the back. He turned up on a school night, as Jack told it, with the clothes he was wearing and a half-bag of Twisties the careworker had bought for him. All he could say was sorry, sorry, sorry. Six years old, only a few months younger than Jack but pond-eyed and nervy as a horse. Flinching at his half-brother’s feints. Hence Tetch, Tetchy, and the name had stuck to him like a bindi-eye. Even now, grown wiry and stoic and lantern-jawed. Jackal-jawed, says her sister, Estelle, who doesn’t trust him. Who’s sure that whatever is rotten in Jack must likewise be rotten in his brother, just more cunningly hidden.

  They’re not the same people, Stell.

  Who ever said they were? I worry though. You let him around those girls …

  Oh please.

  Well you never … Don’t go telling me he’s sound, though, love. Don’t tell me there aren’t a few loose wires up there.

  And Evelyn does have to wonder, sometimes: are they some kind of unaccomplishable task? Herself and Jack and the girls. Not so much more than a giant clock or radio, a machine so big and broken he might spend his whole life tinkering away at it and never get to the part where he has to name a price. Why else?

  She hoists the final box of decorations onto a newly cleared shelf, pushing it back flush against the wall, as far from sight as possible. Till next Christmas, and whatever that might drag with it.

  Around her the useless clutter of the last several years. Somehow never enough money, but still too much stuff. Too much of the wrong stuff. The blue Jantzen swimsuit, she wishes she’d held on to that. Not to actually wear—snowball’s chance she’d get into it now anyway; that body is long gone—but because it stood for something. For a when. What to call it, the when, her life before Jack? Before I met your father. The Coastal Years. Or she might call them The Pre-War Years. When you could put your hands like this. Of course the war had been going on, somewhere (well, she knew where) the entire time she’d been lapping the ocean baths, stringing those lazy summers end-to-end, seaglass beads clacking onto an invisible length of fishing line. And some of the boys from that time, friends’ boyfriends and older brothers, had been wrenched away to fight in it. There were debates in the papers, when she cared to look, speeches on TV and radio. The protests, the marches down Broadway, the moratoriums would all come later. But in any case it had sweet little to do with her, the notion of it as far away as the land it was being fought on.

  It was still going on when she met Jack, but his time in it was done. You could believe that, looking at him then. He’d laugh at any old thing. At the smallest, stupidest … And his hair brilled up like Marlon Brando, spilling over the right side of his forehead in dark glossy waves, with the skew of his grin doing its best to balance that out, always lifting up higher at the left. At any old thing. That was how she first noticed him, noticing her. Just standing there at the foot of the narrow stairway leading up to the projectionist’s booth, gripping the bulky hexagonal canisters that housed the film she and Stell were waiting in line to see. What was it, even, that film? January in Melbourne, and the two of them were on loan to their aunt and uncle. Three whole weeks—what was there to do after walking a million laps of the Tan and trying to be polite about the oily jellyfish bath that was Port Phillip Bay? It was as hot as chip fat, and no nice place to swim, unless you took a car. The girls saw films. Anything and everything showing. That particular day it might have been that stupid vampire blockbuster Stella had been tugging her sleeve about. And when they’d gone to the candy bar for a couple of Cokes, there was the projectionist again, his smile skewiff, Bring us back a Cherry Ripe, love?

  And why the hell not, she’d thought, just to see what it was like up there (airless, acrid, panic-causing; how could he have stood it? she’d later wonder, knowing what she came to know). But if she was honest—telling Stell to go on in and save her a seat, twirling the red-foiled chocolate bar like a baton—it was to see that slow curl of his smile.

  Oh come on, get off it, Stell said later. It wasn’t a smile, you dolt, it was a bloody leer.

  But for those first few years. When he could still stand things, or at least pretend to. When he could still stand to be around people. Before all the shrapnel had worked its way to the surface. I wanna see you in uniform. And she had wanted to. She’d been idiot enough to want that. Now here were these things she wishes she could unsee. Unlearn. Unlive. That make-you-stronger guff was just that.

  The last of The Coastal Years belonged to a burnt-orange halter bikini—part payment for a small-change fashion shoot she’d done at twenty, modelling a now-extinct line of beachwear while smoking a now-extinct brand of cigarette. Everything was burnt-orange in those days. The ’70s could really only be remembered in those saturated tangerines and iridescent blues. Even dreams played out in Kodachrome. Kids could be forgiven for believing the world truly looked like that then.

  She’d been wearing th
e burnt-orange on that last morning at the baths, when Jack came to scoop her out of the water; This is it, Kiddo. And an hour later, her hair was dried to pale stiff waves, to salty blonde meringue, as she packed the car with whatever would fit into it, her father standing tall and stock still on the verandah.

  Is this how you’re thanking us? He was booming up there, at first, but he quickly fell soft when he saw there would be no stopping her. We didn’t buy you that car so you could drive it away on us, love. Your mother and I …

  But her mother was inside, refusing to play a part in the drama. Refusing to look or to speak whenever Ev went in for another armload of dresses. This was the same tactic she’d employed with Ev and Stell when they were tantrumming children. Eyes on the road. Let them exhaust themselves of their nonsense. Now she just stood there in the kitchen, rinsing and re-rinsing the dishcloth, wringing it out tight, wiping down the draining board. Stell had already left for school, and so missed the opportunity to be corrupted by the scene. She was sore about it for a good few years, Evelyn sneaking off that way.

  And you took off with my Polaroid!

  Dad bought you a new one though.

  That’s not the point …

  See! I knew he would.

  That afternoon she’d driven as far as Yass, and there Jack took over. That Janis Joplin song on the radio every couple hundred ks and Evelyn la-da-da-la-na-nahhing along, tuning out the lyrics that didn’t suit her, any words that didn’t fit the thrill of flight, of freedom freedom freedom, and they reached Wangaratta by dark. That motel with its faded apricot carpet and stuccoed walls, where even the fake plants looked thirsty, and they’d fucked in a bed for the first time. Thin sheets and thinner walls, light from the hallway cigarette machine creeping under the doorsill. She didn’t care. It was trashy as all get out but she was revelling in it. After those few times in Melbourne—shaking sand out of her clothes, or sneaking up to Jack in the bio box, or standing with her back against the Brighton breakwall, him pulling from her at the last possible second and turning to the ocean, pumping his cock towards the spray—after all that, this sagging motel bed felt real. (Though much later she’d catch herself missing, oddly, those hasty claustrophobic trysts of the bio box, the tattoo of film ricketing off the reel and the sound it made matching up to the stammering pulse of blood behind her eyelids, her hands greasy with his hair, and the theatre downstairs erupting over something Newman or McQueen had either won or escaped from.)

  That night in the motel she lay on top of the covers and it felt salacious, indulgent, like they were trying on the lives of other people.

  Jack had told her to go ahead and scream if you want, sweetheart. We’re never going to see any of these bastards again.

  Lani was born shaking into her arms in the middle of that decade, and would not stop shaking until the beginning of the ’80s. Evelyn tries to remember this shaking whenever she runs in with the rangy, foul-mouthed creature who haunts the room at the end of the hallway, shut in there with a blurry sort of music. Tries to remember the trembling of the little spine felt through terry-towelling jumpersuits, the vulnerable blossom mouth, as she stares at the poster tacked up and torn at the corner nearest the doorknob. The band members look like they’re all dying of the same disease. Behind the poster, Lani’s door is all splinters and strips of packing tape. Behind the wrecked door, the throb of something dreary. She knocks and waits before trying the handle, knowing it’ll be locked whether her oldest daughter is in there or not. No energy for a row this afternoon, she just follows the routine disarmament the two of them have fallen into over the last few years. These shitty locks; they’re mostly cosmetic anyway. Won’t really keep anyone out, will just slow them down long enough so that whoever’s on the other side has time to get their pants up. She makes wordlessly for the kitchen. Rummaging the cutlery drawer, then padding back down the hallway to attack the snib with a butterknife. Lani’s door swings open on an empty room, gauzy curtains drawn back to reveal the flyscreen with its escape hatch sliced into one corner. Gone then. Today and forever. Even when she comes back this afternoon, or tonight—tomorrow morning; who knows?—Evelyn will find no way of reaching her, no way of getting her to listen. Through threats or through fists, neither works now. Lately she’s astonished herself with her own ferocity, how it closes over her, suffocates reason. How the marks on her daughter’s body have begun to mirror her own. Lani that morning, reaching for a high spot with the paint scraper, and her pyjama top hiking up to show a familiar purpling at the hip, door-handle height. Law of Conservation. Absorption and emission. Ev tries to remember what she learnt in fifth-form science. How it all has to go somewhere. How light becomes heat and heat becomes—what? The science teacher’s hand spiralling to show the chain of elements. Very tall, he was, very Dutch. His name was … But it doesn’t matter; she knows this isn’t what he was on about when he set up those tabletop experiments of pulleys and weights.

  She stands in the bedroom doorway, butterknife held loose at her side. New Year’s Eve. (Happy New Year’s, Eve!) There comes a point. There comes a point where you have to say, Here it is. Here is what life looks like. Where you stop turning your head away, cupping your ears—la-da-da-la-na-nah—because you finally understand it won’t do any good.

  For years now, she’s been waking to the same knowledge: This is not my life. Grey eucalypts shaking out there in the stonewashed sky and Jack’s loose copper change scattered across the veneer bedside table. No, none of this is right. None of this fits. There’s been some hash-up. Someone else out there living her real life, running up the mileage on it the way you would a stolen car. But they’ll own up eventually. They’ll have to, with all the guilt and the worry wearing them down. The joyride can’t go on forever. One day Ev will wake up and there it will be, her real life, parked gleaming in the driveway. Returned.

  She’d seen it so clearly. This whole time, all these years, she could just about smell it—a salt breeze playing curtains into that bright, high-ceilinged room.

  But this is it. The butterknife, the torn flywire, the cluster of dorsal pearls on someone else’s souvenir handbag. This familiar taste in her mouth, like colloidal silver, which she understands and refuses to understand.

  Outside, tyres churn the sparse gravel of the driveway. Estelle. Out of the blue, as always, as if to catch her out at something. Down the dark hallway goes Evelyn, past the sunsets and gorges and waterfalls tacked over fist-pocked plasterboard. The Kakadu gorge is her favourite of these, a big hole hiding a small hole; she knows no-one else who would find this funny. For Christmas she’d thought of buying Jack a stud finder. As if to say: Punch Here. But it seemed a lot of effort to go to just to humiliate someone. Or more likely enrage them. And it turned out he wouldn’t have been there to unwrap it anyway; the shirt she’d bought instead is still tucked down into the bottom of the wardrobe.

  The mottled shape of her sister appears at the sidelight, hullooing and drumming lurid orange fingernails against the glass.

  Evvie? Home?

  She opens the door. Stella in pale crepe de chine, looking like the heat wouldn’t dream of wilting her. That false light in her eyes and a high arc of brow at the butterknife still dangling from Ev’s fingers.

  Oh my love … It’ll take more than that to chase me off.

  Come on, Evelyn says, already half-turning. Come on in out of that heat.

  Her sister’s face sometimes. When she comes into the house and takes in the dirty lino, the dishes stacked up in the sink, or any fresh violence wreaked in one of Jack’s storms. Ev doesn’t want to see her seeing it, the judgement she’ll find there. She walks ahead, giving Stell a few moments to compose the neat diamond of her face. But by the time they reach the kitchen she still hasn’t quite managed it, so Evelyn turns away again, quickly, running the tap into the kettle.

  At certain safe distances, they are good friends. When there are a couple of hundred kilometres of
Hume and a decent stretch of Melbourne between them, her sister is the best person she knows. But up close, sharing air … It’s this house that does it, makes the two of them strangers. Perched on the fridge, the card Stell posted two weeks ago: It Is Better To Have Loved And Lost … above an illustration of an elegant woman shrugging, gloriously flippant. The easy stupid humour of other people.

  Stell moves a stack of newspapers from one of the dining chairs, then sits and lights an Alpine, flicking her eyes around for Jack’s abalone-shell ashtray, which has been emptied, washed and—for the first time in its post-mollusc history—put away. Evelyn retrieves it from the cupboard and clacks it down in front of Stell, who taps her ash and says, wide-eyed, So! He really is gone for good then?

  Gone for good … With her shoulders Evelyn answers, Who knows? But she’s thinking: If he is gone for good. If he’s gone for good then maybe she doesn’t have to tell him. Doesn’t have to tell anyone. Is exempt from telling. Would he want to hear it anyway? Hardly. Would he say, Look, we’re keeping it, and come running right back? Hardly. And what if he did and what—oh god—if it turned out to be a boy. He’d be harder on a boy, she knows it. The one she’d lost had been a boy. Too early to tell, conclusively, but she just knew. With each of the girls she’d gotten sun spots, and that time there were none, even though it had been well into summer.

  Gone for good. She tries to hold steady: the fist knuckled up and shaking under her chin. The near-constant throb of a door handle in the small of her back, the bruises that bloomed overnight, like casablancas, and even she couldn’t say where half of them came from.

  And when she looks at Stell on the other side of the kitchen, looking ten years younger instead of two. The taut, haughty structure of her face, and hair the colour that Ev’s had once been, until it started falling out, inexplicably, after Ruby was born. Hanks of it in spite of the gentle pull of a wide-tooth comb, till there was nothing left. When it did come back, it came back white. Dandelion down, tic-toc fluff she imagined might blow away if the wind so chose. She wasn’t yet thirty then. Now she pharmacy-dyes it herself to a pale honey. But somehow it always comes off looking brassy when she’s next to Stell, as though they’re standing in two different kinds of light, Evelyn always caught in the wrong kind.