Even in the dark he wouldn’t look at her. She could tell that, hear it. His head still turned highway-ward, his voice aimed down at the road when he said, I know, love. I’m sorry. But there isn’t much I can do about it, hey.
She let him walk on alone to the station that would sometimes dream up a train for him to leave on.
She squints towards the stand of pines. Those mushrooms don’t grow there anymore. Either kind. She’s looked. Maybe the weather is wrong for them. Or maybe they do grow there, and something else always gets to them first. That’d be right.
Will, of course he’s found something better to do, somebody more interesting to do it with. Those stories he has of trekking all over the South Island. Hitching most of the ride with a couple of Maori punk girls in an old converted ambulance, getting nipped at by their contraband pet stoat, Baby Marmite. Breakfasts of stolen servo pastries—microwaved, they were that cocky. Night swimming stoned under cold stars and falling asleep to the thrash of the ocean. He still wears a jagged seal tooth around his neck, scooped up from the black sand at Piha. Crabeater, crenulated; like a lick of flame carved from bone, threaded onto leather. That same beach had later snapped him from the strap of a board and flung him into the rocks. Two weeks in a coma, he’d told her, and now the only thing that could scare him was the thought of ever being forced to lie that still again.
Can’t be much better being here, she’d answered, petulant. Knowing it wasn’t his choice to be: he’ll leave when he can, and even if he stays long enough he’ll get bored of her. The furthest she’s ever been in her life is Lakes Entrance, which Ru—only little then—summed up as looking better in fridge magnets.
The other options for tonight are too bleak to ponder. Rage with mum, Monopoly with Ru. If she’d planned ahead she could’ve snuck a lift to the city, bringing down seven shades of strife at home, but it was too late for that anyway, she’s stuck here now.
She mouths the words for a poem Mim had tricked her into learning by heart. (Five minutes, Lah. How long is five minutes? Just as long as it takes Maud to get into the garden, love; on you go.) A distraction Lani later used with Ru when the folks were in demolition mode. She’ll give Will until larkspur. She meanders through it four times before she hears the thrum of the Honda, and a moment later Will crests the rise.
He props the bike and falls into the shade beside her, still fumbling with his helmet. Sorry, he says. Got called in on Dad duty. When he pulls the helmet off she sees the barbell has been knocked from his brow, the skin there split like soft fruit.
She shakes the box of pills at him for hello. Lose a fight?
Just a footy match, he grins. You get the names of those?
He’ll care?
Will shrugs. Aiden, I reckon he’ll care. Everyone else—most people will just take whatever they’re given.
Okay, well. This one’s Valium, definitely, and this is temazepam—pretty much the same, isn’t it? And I don’t know what these little shits are. She spills a few out into her palm and he shrugs again.
But they’re all benzos, right?
I guess, yeah.
Not exactly social stuff but like I said, people out here will just swallow—that’s if we’re even headed to the same party. Those the only shoes you got?
Telling him to go chase himself would be the right answer, she knows, but her mouth feels too dry, even to laugh.
Well, he says, uneasy now. So long as she doesn’t conk out halfway, yeah? Oh, hey. I brought something.
From the bike’s dusty pannier he takes out a little rocket-looking thing, red and silver. Soda thingumy, for whipped cream. She knows that much.
Used to be my nan’s, he says, digging around in the pannier for a cardboard box of what look like miniature torpedoes. Let me get you set up, and he loads one into the soda-thing and twists until there’s a muffled crack and hiss—whatever it is escaping from the tiny bomb. Condensation clouding then beading up the metal.
Laughing gas, like dentists use, Will explains. Like sucking the helium out of a balloon, yeah? But you just take it straight from the siphon. You’ll want to be sitting down, probably.
Lani breathes as she’s told, cold fog blooming in her lungs. Then tipping back just as the sky pulls away. Like plunging into a deep pool, somewhere down inside her own body. Towards the surface of herself she’s aware of him. Above her, going skksh tsh tsh in her ear. Underwater noises, the whistle and tick of crays, yabbies, rivermud creatures. Peaceful. She could stay, down at the silty bottom. Doesn’t want to leave, to come back. But back she comes, anyway. Floating up from that great depth and breaking surface in the paddock of summer grass, where he’s stopped making the noises and her mouth has run drier still. When she opens her eyes she sees him watching her, the way a person might watch an animal dream, like she’s a cat with twitching paws.
Why’d you do that? she asks him.
Huh?
Like crickets or something. She tries to make the noise, sk sksh sksh.
I don’t know. Someone did it for me once. It just makes it. I don’t know. Nicer.
Can I go again?
Doesn’t last long enough, does it? Here, I’ll come with you. He feeds the siphon two of the bombs. Again the hush of air into the chamber, and he lets her take the first lungful. She hands the siphon up to him, and a moment later he’s there beside her; she’s sure she feels the dirt ripple when he falls back against it.
Back down in it, at the bottom of things, she remembers something. No, it’s not remembering. More like going there. To something that has already happened and is still happening. Years ago. But now as well. People talking about her in the next room, wherever that room might be. And what they’re saying, it’s nothing, really—what eventuates is the capacity, the tendency for remanence decay; you copy it ten, a dozen times—just auditory junk she’s picked up, kept stashed up there for some unfathomable reason. Like a radio scanned in from somewhere, but she knows each word the instant before it’s said. Something she’s already dreamed, maybe. She feels the weight of Will’s hand on her stomach, the twitch of her leg, the hauling up. And she fights it, needs to hear the rest, even if she can’t make sense of it. Stirring the murky bottom, thrashing about down there for something she can wrap a hand around, but there’s nothing, nothing solid enough to grasp, and she can’t bring any of it to the surface, good or bad. By the time she comes back to the paddock, the sky, the Ark looming up over them, all the details have smudged away. There’s just the leftover feel of it. A strange, sinister taste in her mouth.
Again? Will asks.
She shakes her head. I’m done, she says, venturing a leg out of the Ark’s shadow to test the sun’s bite.
We’ll make a move then. In a minute. Just let me get my head straight. And they’re quiet for a while in the lengthening shade.
*
The house stands well out from town, halfway to the next, and though she’s never been taken there before, she knows it. Everyone does. Things go on out there. All sorts. Past what was once the reservoir: now just a stagnant pool with floating beer cans, rubbish, and the land around it a dumping ground for wrecked or stolen cars, all their ID numbers scratched away.
The way there is rutted by stubborn tree roots, and by tyres that churned it up in bad weather. Will threads the Honda around the worst of it, the road tossing the bike around, Lani’s arse lifting from the pillion as they take the smaller potholes, dust powdering her shins. Shattered wing-mirrors wink out at her, flashing gold in the last of the sun, as though signalling for someone.
Long before they get in sight of the place, the party reaches out to meet them; the pulse of bass in the dirt, oily bonfire smoke in spite of the fire ban.
That’ll bring pigs.
Cops?
Nah, actual pigs, he laughs. Yeah, cops.
The fire, it eats everything. As Lani and Will pull up, people
are feeding it beer cartons and chairs and a pair of skate shoes someone was stupid or stoned enough to have taken off. They’re melting at the bonfire’s heart, like an offering. Sparks dancing up above the roof of the house.
It’s only just dark. Black plumes of flying foxes spilling overhead like fast ink, but their screeching is lost to the sound system; a lot of industrial yellow electrical cables snaking up through a window into the house. Aiden’s house, but he’s nowhere.
Fireside, people’s faces glow like Halloween masks, orange, blue-black in the shadows. Lani searches for Trina amongst the grim versions of girls she knows but not well enough to talk to, or knows better than to talk to. A little coven of them standing back from the eyelash-curling heat. These girls with hair so sleek it moves like liquid, slips from ties. Eyeing her coolly, We know what you aren’t, before folding back in on themselves.
The borrowed dress clings to her ribs, and underneath there’s her heart thudding like a bird trapped in a box, the way she and Ru had caught a sparrow once, pouncing on it in the garage. Placing their four hands on the shoebox to keep the bird from escaping. The feel of it crashing around beneath, hurting itself. Until quiet. And when they finally lifted the box it was gape-beaked and still, stunned, creamy chest puffing with small quick terror.
Will’s hand is pressed between her shoulderblades, his flask pressed into her hand. She swallows—rum—and lets him lead her away from the fire, from the crush of people, music she doesn’t know and doesn’t care to, spikes of her shoes stabbing into the dirt. Stupid. She takes a deeper swallow from the flask, throws a burning blanket over all of it.
They find him far back from the house, past the rusting husks of old cars and the single strand of wire poked through palings to mean fence. Aiden. Way back where the party is reduced to a dull throb under the grass, light through the trees. Holding on to a rabbit rifle, his long dark hair silky as a girl’s, but he’d once pulled someone’s face down into his knee for saying something like that, and they’d come up with their nose mashed. He’s careless with the rifle, swinging it as he would a stick. Picking fruit bats out of the sky like he’s pointing out constellations: Orion, the Big Dog, the False Cross …
Will says his name.
Hang on a tick.
The crack of the rifle rings out and a black rag drops from the sky, from its flock. The rag flaps around in the long grass, crying, and then is still.
Nobody says anything. Then Will does: You gonna make sure it’s dead, or what?
Nup, hate them things. And when Aiden turns, he sees Lani there.
Sorry, he says. Where’s my manners? Holding the rifle out to her, Wanna shot?
She shakes her head. I’ll be right, thanks.
You never shot? It’s easy but. Go on, I’ll show you how.
I’m right, she says again. Just wanted to …
All business, hey? He gives her an oily wink, untucking a twenty from his shirt pocket, and Lani swaps it for a handful of the pills that are meant to keep her father calm.
They’re—
Not asking what they are.
Careful, Will says. Don’t wanna spend your New Year’s curled up in bed …
Bit of it, why not? And his laugh is terrible. She hopes they do flake him out, the pills.
Aiden looks at Lani then, dead on, as though he’s heard her thoughts. This shit’s not my kind of fun though. Oh hey, sorry about your mongrel bitch. Leaving just enough space there between mongrel and bitch. She blinks at him, holds his eye half a heartbeat before her own gaze wavers then drops. His boots look flayed, laces gone, tongues lolling.
Nah, truly, he says. His voice gone drowsily gentle, almost pillow talk. Accept my condolences and all.
He’s not really such an arsehole, Will says, walking her back up to the house. Or didn’t use to be. Shit happens, you know.
Behind them the rifle shots resume. She asks what kind of shit, and Will elaborates—by shit, he means skidding out one night on a loosely gravelled back road outside Wallan; Aiden’s leg folding under the bike and the exhaust pipe melting right through the skin of his thigh. He means hours unconscious on the bitumen, and blood-poisoning, followed by ever-increasing strengths of painkillers; a steady trading up of opioids—pethidine to morphine to heroin—long after the leg had healed around all its pins, skin left like clingwrap where the pipe fell and lay pressed against it all that time.
They climb back over the single-strand fence. A couple of boys are grappling shirtless in a dry plastic kiddie pool, while their friend stands by shouting through cupped hands, Any takers? Any takers?
How are you travelling? Will asks her.
Okay.
A couple of hours, and if you’re not having fun we can pike.
Couple hours. Okay.
*
The year starts easily enough, with the spatter of homemade pyrotechnics, all the amateur firebugs lighting up what they’ve concocted out of lawnmower diesel and fertiliser or whatever, stuff pilfered from their fathers’ sheds. Dogs going berserk for miles, yapping their heads off. Something will ignite, she knows. And it does, but when it does it’s nothing drastic, only a bottlebrush tree that someone is quick and sober enough to douse with a butchered garden hose.
Lani watches as the bonfire grows to become as big as a room—you could just about live in it—and on the other side, Aiden is licking up one of her dad’s pills from an open palm, catlike, then tonguing it into the mouth of the girl beside him. Nerida. Slacked back in a camping chair, all spangly pink tank top and denim cut-offs, looking dreamy. Too many, already. Who is that dumb? Trina had once convinced her to eat warm wax, swearing that it would line her stomach better than cream, and the little fool had gone for it. Afterwards they’d watched her throwing up Veet-laced bourbon into a patch of hydrangeas, telling themselves they had done her a favour of sorts, that she would probably think again in future … But apparently no, she would not.
Aiden catches Lani’s eye across the fire. Flashes her a conspiratory sort of smile, like she’s in on something, and she looks away.
She’s good at booze. Usually she is. Since year eight, smuggling vodka into class in a Fanta bottle, or a ginger ale bottle, bourbon into cola, whatever she could lay her hand to. Sneaking doses through maths—especially maths—just enough to quiet down the panic and let her drift through, failing calculus in a syrupy haze. Inking brumbies and turbulent rivers of song lyrics across the graph paper, so if Mr K looks up she’ll look busy.
But tonight she keeps losing herself, mid-sentence. Coming to amongst strangers, in conversations she can’t remember the beginning of. People watching her, impatient, waiting for her to hurry up and spit it out. Each time she feels that trapped bird, feels the bat plummeting from the blue-black sky, from its liquid flock. How it fell. How fast. She feels that falling over and over.
Somewhere, she knows each of these conversations is only starting, or hasn’t even yet; a secret about time that she’d pulled down with the nitrous gas. She thinks she might be able to get back and eavesdrop on herself, so that she’d know what to answer now.
You can tell, hey, this kid is saying, too close to her face. A stringy, myxomatosis-looking fucker.
What?
Like, the way the skin is peeled back? Away from the bone? A feral cat won’t do that. A fox won’t do that.
She doesn’t want to agree with him. Not on anything at all. It wasn’t like that, she tells him, looking over her shoulder, wondering where Will has disappeared to. Across the fire Aiden is helping that girl Nerida up the back steps. No, not helping. Dragging. She’s kind of melted on him, being half-danced half-hauled in a wharfie’s waltz that takes her through the screen door. Is that right? Doesn’t seem right, but no-one’s paying them any mind.
I took a photo once, thought I got it, says the rabbity kid. Dead sure that I had it, but it must’ve moved quicker than the
shutter could. Wanna know what I reckon?
He’s blinking fast with pink-rimmed eyes. Like he’s a camera himself, snapping everything up. She steps away from him and the backyard tilts. Like that ride at Luna Park—what’s the name of it, what’s the name of it?—when the floor falls away and you’re stuck there to the wall. That’s how it is.
Whoa. The rabbity kid reaches his arm out to steady her, but she shakes him off. Her legs are quaky foal legs but she walks on them anyway, stumbling between the clusters of drinkers on her way towards the house.
The bath is a dozen bags of servo ice turned liquid: wet cardboard and floating labels, bottles of beer and cider soaked brandless. Lani fishes a bottle out of the soup, bangs the cap off on the edge of the sink. Swallows slow, tasting nothing. Steam-warped porn mags stacked inside a yellow milk crate next to the tub, stuck open at their centrefolds. Girls with tattoos of butterflies and tiger-lilies flanking their shaved pussies. She flips through them. Everything lying right out like that, for anyone to rummage through. She opens the medicine cabinet on generations of pharmaceutical junk. Rusted tins of pomade and vaseline, oily-labelled bottles that might’ve been sitting there half a century. Waterbury’s Compound. Magic Silver White. Expired condoms and sticky-looking razor blades dusted with rust and greyish powder. A tray of sewing needles with darkened, sterilised tips. Squashed pill packets with prescriptions for a dozen different names. Lani squints to read the pharmacy labels, looking for Aiden, circa bike accident. Not methadone, but the softer stuff. Pethidine and whatever else. She navigates by the fluoro warning stickers—Do not drive a vehicle, Do not operate heavy machinery—shaking out a small deck of blister packs.What she wants is a box, innocent-looking; aspirin or ibuprofen. Something no-one would think suss if they saw her walking out with it. Or a soft pack of tissues, that’d work, but there’s nothing. She tears strips from the magazines, folds the pills inside makeshift envelopes. These she tucks down into the toes of her shoes, leaning against the edge of the tub and watching the door handle. She stands and tips her beer up for the dregs, then drops the empty back into the meltwater.
Loving, Faithful Animal Page 8
