Coming back down the hall at a shuffle, toes crunched up to make room for the wads of pills, she hears it. This big-animal huffing from one of the bedrooms. The door is cracked open a sliver. If Aiden notices her standing there, he doesn’t show it. Doesn’t stop, anyway. Keeps up his soft murmuring—hey now, there now, there—as though working to soothe a scared injured thing.
*
All through her life, it will return to her—infrequently, but faithfully—and most acutely in the loose hours of flight. The image of this girl; body splayed across the bare mattress, her face puffed closed, dumb as bread. Lani standing in the aisle of a passenger jet, securing the straps of her demonstration oxygen mask, indicating the light on a life vest, placing the whistle mutely to her lips, miming serenity in disaster. Then a foul, chalky taste at the back of her throat, and there it is. Only a few seconds of it—the damp zebra-print underwear rolled down and cutting into the girl’s pale thighs—before the door swings shut, the mind curtaining it again.
Peepshow, she’ll think, straightaway clenching her jaw at the comparison, perturbed. Coward, she’ll think, for turning away at age sixteen and for not bearing to look now—at twenty-four, twenty-seven, thirty-two—though in truth she’ll never be able to call up the scene of her own will.
Once altitude has been reached and the seatbelt signs have blinked off. After the announcement that electronic devices may be used if in flight mode. Once the stubborn meal carts have been shunted up and down enough times, and the horde of passengers are adequately fed and watered, she will slip into a bathroom cubicle, press her hot forehead to the mirror, wonder if she’s eaten something bad. All best intentions of bringing real food, fresh stuff, but somehow always the same foil-packaged bomb-shelter dinners as everyone in economy. She’ll pull herself back from the mirror, frown at the smear left on the glass and wipe it away with a tissue. She’ll arrange the dark wedge of her fringe to hide all the trouble going on underneath, the concern etched there, paint over the tiny white scar on her lower lip in one of the airline’s approved shades—red but not too red, not tarty. The jaundiced light ageing her by half a decade. It’s under such lights, several timezones from sleep, that her mother appears. Looking out, like some storybook queen, from the treacherous architecture of her own features in spite of the hair dye, the flicks of eyeliner, the brightened mouth.
Lani will buff her knuckles along the ridge of her cheekbone, as though grazing some heat there might soften the resemblance. She’ll knot and unknot the rayon scarf at her throat, trying to make it sit right. Rinse at the taste in her mouth with a green sugary wash. Spit. Spit again.
Her mother and the sprawled, benzoed girl; they will continue to find her there, suspended above the Pacific in that long-haul anaesthesia, in a gloaming made of exit-row light. In the slept-in clothes fug of mass slumber. These hours when her own body feels stateless, drifting mothlike from guide light to guide light, between the soft dings that summon peanuts and tonic water, but otherwise beholden to no one person, no one place. Beholden to nothing greater out there than the great dark that holds and keeps the plane. Earth far below, and real life down there with it, the self left unfixed and undefended. And so the ghosts float up, slip through.
*
In the first hours of 1991, she closes the bedroom door. Walks cool and deliberate as she’s able, down the hall, heels snagging the carpet. Will is somewhere. She’ll find him and tell him—what? Nothing, it’s none of her business, and anyway she doesn’t want to risk drawing attention to herself. She’s tired, they should bail now, enough? She shoves through the screen door too hard, a bottle of clear spirit shattering on the concrete steps.
Fuck. Watch it. A girl scowling through hair dyed the blue of a sick Siamese fighting fish.
Lani turns and apologises and tries to leave in the one action, the step vanishing beneath her, her ankle swivelling. Face striking hard against the handrail, a warm tinny taste spilling into her mouth.
The girl who’s lost her vodka looking down at her. Hun, she says. You’re bleeding.
Lani wipes the back of a hand under her chin and it comes back slick. It’s not mine, she tells the girl. Oh, it is. Ah shit. I hardly felt it.
Here. Come on, you’ll muck up your dress.
I hardly felt it, she says again.
Can she stand? Will, getting her under the arms. Watch the glass there, and Lani lets herself be lifted to standing and led back into the house, like snapping back on a retractable cord, back to exactly where she doesn’t want to be; limping past that still-closed bedroom door. No sound escaping from underneath its sill, now.
In the bathroom she grits her teeth at the cabinet mirror. Red tracing her gums.
Will locks the door behind them—Lemme look—and Lani turns out her lower lip to show the split there.
Uh-huh, that could be worse. Won’t need stitches, at least.
You a nurse now or something?
Might as well be. What with Dad. Siddown, can you? He drenches a handtowel with warm water.
Lani lowers herself to the edge of the bathtub, lets him dab at her chin, at her neck where the blood has snaked down. The towel smells of wet dog and petrol, and she tries not to breathe.
Don’t know what you were thinking, touching his boot to her shoe. Accident waiting to happen, these; sure nothing’s twisted in there?
Guess I’ll find out later. If I take them off now I might never get them on again.
Tilt your head back a bit.
Lani eyes the ceiling, its map of mildew. Feeling his breath on her throat, wondering what’s keeping her from wrapping her legs around him. Only that she wants to. Someone rattles the doorknob and Will yells for whoever it is to piss off.
Pass me a fucken beer then. Whoever’s mouth slurring up close to the doorjamb.
I said you can fucken wait, Will tells the door. He folds the towel to find a clean corner, then goes back to his dabbing. She closes one eye to keep the fluoro tube from doubling itself.
Okay?
She nods and makes to stand to prove it.
Hold your horses, we’re not done yet. He rummages in the medicine cabinet for a roll of cotton wool, tearing off a plug of it and running it under the tap.
Here. He packs the wool into Lani’s lower lip. Okay, you look a bit like you’re trying to start something, but the bleeding should stop pretty soon. You wanna stick around here or go?
Home?
’Less there’s some place you’d rather.
She might ask him now. Could we go …? Could you take me just as far as …?
And he might say, Yeah, okay. How fast can you throw your shit together?
But all that will mean is saving on bus fare, the little money she has stretching just a little longer. And she’d owe him something more than those few stingy bucks. More than she’s already made up her mind to ever owe anyone.
No, she says. Sounding dopey around the soggy gauze. Just home.
The door handle rattles again, another fist pounding the bathroom door.
Okay. Let these munters get to their precious booze. Will flings the handtowel into the icy beer water, turns back to the sink, kisses Lani on her hurt mouth. Just procedure. He unlatches the door, but whoever was out there has given up and gone away. And when they pass that bedroom, it is empty, the door left wide open. As though nothing bad has happened in there. There’s even a sheet spread across the mattress now, faded but tucked tight. Hospital corners.
Her helmet is gone, somewhere. Taken or lost, she doesn’t know.
Here, have this one, and Will passes her his father’s old open-faced and wears nothing himself. He judders the Honda over the ravaged road, not picking the way so carefully now: hitting roots and potholes, the bike jerking around like a spooked animal. Headlamp bouncing crazily, sweeping deep into the silver trunks of the gums, signalling back to the wrecks out there, Rem
ember life? Will keeps taking his hand from the grip to reach back and give a squeeze to her knee, and each time he does, she thinks, Now. We’ll spill. And welcomes it almost. But it doesn’t go that way. They make it out to the highway, wet-looking in the moonlight, gather speed. Now and then the headlamp picking up the white bones of makeshift crash markers planted at the side of the bitumen.
Pre-dawn gnats swat her face and she swats back at them through the front of the helmet, swiping them away from her puffy lip. Her toes are crushed past feeling, for the sake of what? Twenty bucks, if she can be bothered to ask it, or her own little languor, a few furred hours to retreat into. Lani scrapes her heels against the pillion pegs, lets the shoes and their cargo fall into the road. A calm soaks in, with the warmth from Will’s back, with every k put between her and that house.
One or the other of them howls then. Then they both do. There’s the moon hanging above them, looking one moment solid enough to knock on, and the next moment like a hole punched through the dark satin sky. She keeps an eye on it, to stop it from darting away. Will reaches again for her knee, and she presses closer to stop the icy morning prying in between. Whatever she feels now is only because of the warmth from his back, the metallic taste of the early morning air and the two of them knifing through it. Only momentum, only velocity; how it settles something down in her. Still. The impulse is there, persistent and useless. The need to say one good thing, bigger than thanks. May the road rise to meet you and may the wind always be at your back. Just words she’s seen somewhere, in cross-stitch—somebody’s grandmother’s busywork—but it seems about right. Then all of a sudden it doesn’t. Sounds instead like a kind of curse, that first part about the road rising, what with the bike and all. The patch of skin on Aiden’s calf, crinkled like plastic. She’d glimpsed that, she realises. Looking in. The railway of scars along his leg where they’d stapled him back together.
She says nothing, feels herself floating out there in the dark. Beyond the reach of any of it. Hard and cool and distant as a star. It all belongs to this summer. A winter will come and roll over it, over Will and everything else, and soon enough it will belong to last summer. Then the summer before last. Three years ago, four. And after that she’ll stop counting.
*
Creeping shoeless around the back of the house, she trips over the rabbit hutch, dragged up from the yard. They will outlast everything, these rabbits. Will still be there when both girls have fled, flown.
Her own bedroom window has been snibbed. No surprise. You want to stay out all night then by all means, my girl, stay out all night. And she’s slept out in the garage before, cocooned in paint-spattered sheets. But Ru. Ru will always let her in.
She doesn’t even have to knock; her sister’s window has been left open a crack. Cat flap. Lani slinks in, tries to be quiet. But Ru is already sitting bolt upright, liquid-eyed, watching her.
What happened to you?
Shh. Go back to sleep.
But your face …
Shh.
I wasn’t asleep.
In the dark of her own room, she peels off the dress; stiff in places, sticky in others. Blood, dried and not yet. She steps out of her underwear and kicks around until she finds this morning’s towel on the floor.
In the lounge room, her mother sleeps sitting up in one of the nubbly armchairs, even though there’s no-one thrashing around the dark of her own bedroom.
It’s the infomercial hour, the ads just audible. People spruiking contour pillows, dinnerware, home-security gadgets.
Lani stands there a minute, wrapped in her towel, waiting to see what sort of free stuff they’ll throw in. Waterproof shower radios, washable slip covers, one for the home and one for the office, money-back guarantee. Stuff she knows is just useless junk, more plastic for fish to choke on a few years forward. Secure it to the bench, and a little cabbage turns into a carload of coleslaw …
It’s someone’s job, programming these dead hours, cramming them full. Someone’s job to know who’s out here, and that what they’re lonely for at four a.m. is a home-beading kit or an ultrasonic pet remote, or sex chat lines, or Fred and Ginger dancing up and down stairs, up and down stairs. Crosby and Hope riding fake camels through a fake desert. Her mother loves that escapist shit, the ostrich plumes and the lit-up staircases, endings that are glamorous even when they’re not happy.
The television light is not kind to her sleeping face, greying the skin, darkening the hollows. She looks drowned there, cold, in the underwater gloom thrown from the set.
Come on, you’re gonna wreck your back, but Evelyn only murmurs a noise that sounds like agreement.
Lani pulls a red wool blanket from the armrest of the couch, where it’s hiding a spot Belle liked to chew. Tucks it around the grey-blue ghost of her mother, while on-screen a salesman throws in free steak knives, storage containers, pocket-sized alarms. Things to make life easier, tidier, safer.
V. Madrugada
something’s coming. les can smell it like weather. Can just about hear it, like a sound pitched so low that only the blood can recognise it. The dull thuds of homemade fireworks died away around two a.m., and then came a quiet spell, a brooding stillness now punctured by what’s likely rifle fire. Just the odd crack of it now and again, beyond the fibro walls of the shed. Drunken New Year’s rabbiting, boys who couldn’t get laid now killing just to kill, whatever they can get. Fill yer boots.
He’s been out here since one or so, working to settle himself. Solder smoke and citronella smoke mingling in the dome of light thrown by an old goose-neck lamp, hooded and twisted up like a bronze cobra. Showing Les his hands and the naked radio chassis upturned on the bench between them, and the soldering iron with its coiled wick. The radio’s bakelite shell stands sentinel beside the half-dozen capacitors—waxy, dead—that he’s snipped out, replacing bad for good as he goes. Plugging the radio back into the socket after each exchange, monitoring his progress. A little louder, a little bit louder now, the call and response of some old gospel number. Good good good.
He works in singlet and shorts, mosquitoes wreaking a constellation of havoc on his undefended arms and legs, never mind the citronella coils. A pause now and then to slap or scratch, or to etch the angriest of the bites with a cross, digging in his blunt thumbnail this way then that. A trick his nieces taught him when they were little and still interested in showing him what they knew. The crosses are either meant to make the bites itch less, or they’re meant to help the swelling go down. Or maybe they’re only intended to shuffle the mind along; he can’t remember exactly.
The radio innards give him the news—he thinks of bird entrails, of voodoo—telling him which parts of the world are just now rolling over into 1991: Hanoi, Jakarta, an hour-wide ribbon of Russia. That it’ll be a fine day, thirty degrees, no chance of storm. Les turns the radio off and fits it snug into its cover, then turns it on a final time, laying his hands on the bakelite to feel the moment before sound arrives, that warm whir, as though it were a box of bees. Forty bucks, it’ll fetch, maybe fifty. Or maybe Ev will like it.
He sets down the solder and rehouses the iron. Nudges the shed door and props it open for the cleaner air. Outside it’s pitch, a velvet blackness. Madrugada, the Spanish call it. This dark stretch leading up to the dawn. English wants a word like that, something that sounds both magic and malevolent, but there isn’t one. Or not one he knows of. Just the wee small hours, and that doesn’t fit, doesn’t conjure any of the right feelings, any of the wonder or the dread.
There’s a stirring in the tall seeded grass beyond his fenceline, a light breeze causing shivery spoondrift. Gotta know your wind, someone told him once. Years back, this bloke on a vineyard job. Told it like Les was ignorant. He supposed he was, in some matters, philosophically and spiritually. His conversations with god amounted to little more than the transparencies of handwritten hymns looming up from the tabletop projector when he an
d Jack were Sunday-school kids. And still, he’d only pretended to sing, mouthing the shapes of the words and letting the other kids fill in the sound.
But the vineyard worker wasn’t necessarily talking about god. Where was this? Grapes. The Swan. Pruning instead of picking, so it couldn’t have been later than September. The two of them working their way down the rows, doing only the lefthand vines so that the morning sun wasn’t in their eyes—a system of their own devising. They’d do the right side when the sun had crossed to the west.
Look, the bloke was telling him, throwing clippings over his shoulder. It’s simple enough …
There was a sort of guttering about his voice when he said certain words, an unsteadiness, the remnants of an accent. Les hadn’t asked which part of the world it had come from.
You become to learn the difference between which wind is yours, and which is not. Yes? Got it?
Les nodded, feeling all the while lost, and his workmate saw that.
Like with your hands there, he went on, gesturing with the secateurs, and they both looked at the long-healed nubs where Les’s index fingers had once been.
If you knew which wind was bad news, you maybe have seen this coming. You maybe have better prepared.
Les wasn’t ashamed, but he busied his hands back amongst the vine leaves.
The fella went on: Someone else perhaps won the lottery that day. Someone else, perhaps he got his dick sucked raw—hah!—by some beautiful woman. Because that wind was his, but it sure as shit was not yours. So. You know which did this? He motioned again in the direction of Les’s hands, but what could Les say? It was as if they were never his to begin with, and once they were gone he’d been relieved. There was no way of explaining that to the itinerant, to anyone who made a living with their hands. To avoid having either to explain or to lie, he shrugged and grinned.
Loving, Faithful Animal Page 9
