Relief

by Anna Taylor

  ‘I thought of you,’ she said again.

  Beth could already see what it was before they got there, even though she was a little distance away on the bank. She followed Alice down, so that her toes were perched right on the edge.

  Alice turned her eyes towards her then.

  ‘Isn’t it like electricity?’ she said.

  That feeling—of something magical—crept towards Beth, filling her up so that she too suddenly felt truly alive.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is.’

  The water was on fire, or that’s how it seemed. It was lit up like a Christmas tree, or fireworks in a night sky. It was as if tiny stars had fallen down and were moving around in there, under the surface.

  ‘I’ve never seen it before,’ said Alice. ‘Is it phosphor-escence? Is that what it’s called?’

  Beth had seen it, though not for years, and never like this. She pulled the bulkiness of her sweatshirt around herself, feeling where the air was getting in, and moved her feet up and down in small jogging steps to keep warm. Little balls of clay rolled out of the bank under her feet, dropping almost soundlessly into the river.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said to Alice. ‘Thank you for calling me, it’s beautiful.’

  Alice didn’t turn to her, or smile, but she reached out her fingers and found Beth’s wrist, clamped her hand around it. Her fingers felt cool and smooth and finely made, the bones under the skin fragile as china. She just held on to Beth, quite tight, so that the blood in her wrist began to drum loudly against the skin.

  ‘You know the electricity you get,’ she said to Beth, ‘and the shocks? You know how you were telling me? I’ve got something in my throat,’ she said. ‘It’s been here for weeks, the feeling. Like a bone is stuck in there—’ she moved her free hand up towards her neck, and swept her fingernail across it in a dramatic slitting gesture— ‘lying right across it,’ she said. ‘Like that.’

  There was a sound behind them, though Beth hardly registered it. It seemed heavy and yet quiet, somehow; a shuffling, a rustling under the ground and on top of it; something natural and normal, wind or water. Neither Beth nor Alice turned to see what it was.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ said Beth. ‘You must miss your family.’

  ‘Who knows?’ said Alice lightly. ‘There’s only him.’ She moved her lips over her teeth and bit into them. ‘I wouldn’t miss him,’ she said.

  ‘Your father?’

  Alice may have shrugged her shoulder slightly. Beth couldn’t tell. She had let go of Beth’s wrist now, but her arm still seemed to be outstretched towards her, as if she was feeling her way in the dark.

  ‘Are things all right with Will?’ said Beth. ‘Alice?’

  Alice tilted her head, and stared out across the river at the bank on the other side, the dark swarm of trees on its edge, the road beyond them. The headlights of a car swung into view, lighting up the trees, shocking their leaves into life. Even though the car was some distance away, the sound of its engine and its tyres against the road soared towards them, a rushing hiss that snapped off as the car swung away into the black.

  Perhaps it was that—the suddenness of the car, close and yet far away—that made Beth turn around, the shell of quiet having been broken. She did not just move her head, but her whole body, and she found herself facing Will, who was standing behind them, a few metres away, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his dressing gown. She heard a sound come out of her own mouth like the faint cry of a bird.

  Alice didn’t move, her face staring straight ahead out across the water.

  ‘Will,’ Alice said, without hesitation or alarm, but still quite loudly. She had not turned to see him, but she knew, somehow, he was there.

  Will was only wearing his boxer shorts, the dressing gown open, flapping slightly against his legs. The lamps on the porch of the laundry were on, and they glowed behind him so that he looked like a cut-out, his hair on a sharp triangular angle, set like that from sleep. Beth didn’t know what to say.

  She tried to smile.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘You’re awake.’

  He lifted his hands to his face and seemed almost to claw at it, rubbing at his eyes and eyebrows.

  ‘And you are too,’ he said to Beth. ‘Or are you? Awake? What are you doing out here? What are you two doing out here together?’

  Despite his agitation, Alice remained quite still, her arms by her sides.

  ‘Beth and I are just looking at things,’ she said calmly.

  He made a coughing sound. ‘Looking at things?’

  ‘Looking at things.’ Her tone was firm, as if she were a teacher, he the child.

  She turned suddenly towards him, so that the three of them were placed like points of a triangle.

  Will started to laugh, though it was a vaguely hysterical sound.

  ‘Beth,’ he said. ‘What on earth is going on?’

  Beth could feel Alice’s breathing beside her, the soft snuffle of it—in and out—rapid but not strained. She had lifted her hand to her throat and was holding it there against the skin.

  Will, always prone to tantrums, lifted one bare foot up and then pounded it against the ground, making the whole bank quake.

  ‘Could someone tell me what is going on?’ he said, and then swallowed hard. ‘Come back to bed,’ he said, far too angrily. ‘I don’t know what the hell is going on out here, but I’m asking you, Allie. Please. Come back to bed.’

  His shoulders seemed to collapse forward, and for a moment Beth thought he might cry.

  ‘She only called me because of the electricity,’ Beth said, ‘and the river. It’s nothing to worry about, Will. Come on now. Quieten down.’

  ‘Come back to bed,’ he said to Alice again, though he was looking at his feet.

  ‘No thank you,’ she said sweetly, her eyes wide, her hand still held to her throat. ‘I like it out here at the moment,’ and she smiled at him encouragingly.

  Will let out an exasperated shuddering sigh, and flapped his arms around a little, and looked from Alice to Beth and back again.

  ‘This has to stop,’ he said to Alice. ‘Why can’t you just stay in bed at night? Like normal people.’

  If he wanted an answer, he didn’t wait for it. He seemed to pick himself up—pulling his shoulders back, lifting his head—and without another word turned and walked away from them, the dressing gown flying out behind him like a cloak.

  Alice continued to smile, watching him go.

  ‘Is there something wrong between you two?’ Beth said, but Alice paid no attention. She turned back towards the river as if she had simply erased Will with one blink. She looked into the water for a moment, and then she moved her fingers towards Beth’s arm, took hold of her wrist again.

  ‘Do you think you could look for me?’ she said. ‘In my throat? With your torch?’

  Beth didn’t know what to say. She felt slightly embarrassed, and overtired—as if she could cry. She looked at the darting lights in the water.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, and then she paused. ‘Of course.’

  Alice moved her head immediately towards her, holding her wrist tight, and opened her mouth wide. The breeze lifted her hair again, like it had when she had reached out her hand to Beth on the bank. It looked so thin and light, as if it could lift off her head and float away.

  Beth turned on the torch and shone it right down Alice’s throat. The pinkness, rawness, of it jumped towards her. She could smell the slight sourness of Alice’s breath, like something that had once been sweet but wasn’t any more: milk on the turn. Her epiglottis jolted around nervously, but other than that nothing seemed unusual. It was just raw-looking and ridgy, like all throats, Beth imagined.

  ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to see anything,’ she said, straining her neck, bobbing her eyes around. ‘I can’t tell. I don’t think I can see far enough down.’

  Alice dropped her head, and shut her mouth, and swallowed hard.

  ‘I don’t think it is
a bone,’ she said. ‘I don’t think there’s anything stuck. It’s just the feeling.’

  And then she smiled, quite brightly. ‘Thanks for looking anyway,’ she said. She released her grip on Beth’s wrist, and leaned her head back so she was looking at the sky. She lifted her arms out to her sides.

  ‘It’s probably nothing to worry about,’ she said. ‘Thanks all the same.’

  The wind stirred the trees again, and the water, so that the surface rippled. Beth swung her head back so she too was looking at the sky.

  ‘What do you think’s up there?’ said Alice, and she flapped her arms slightly. ‘I think a whole lot of nothing,’ she said. She seemed lighter, and whiter—if that was possible; as if she had unloaded a great weight.

  A whole lot of nothing. No matter. No matter.

  Beth turned to look at her. ‘Maybe that and something else, too,’ she said.

  Alice didn’t say anything, but Beth felt her silent agreement. The outline of her profile was tilted right back, so that her neck seemed to form a straight line right up to her chin.

  ‘I’m glad you called,’ Beth said, and Alice nodded, a blurry movement, a flash of white in the dark.

  ‘Yes,’ she said definitely, the word moving out of her mouth and into the night. ‘Yes.’

  Beth just stood there looking at Alice, and Alice looked up, directing her words at nothing in particular.

  ‘Do you ever get the feeling that there’s nowhere left to go?’ she said, though she didn’t wait for Beth’s answer. ‘Like you’re all locked up, but as soon as you’re set free you just stand there waiting to be let back in. And it isn’t even that it’s a bone,’ she said again. ‘I’m pretty sure of that. But sometimes I feel as if I could hook my finger down and pull one out.’ She scuffed her feet against the ground. ‘I’d like the feeling,’ she said, ‘of pulling something out of there.’ She smiled then to herself, a faint curl of her lips, still looking up at the sky, blinking hard.

  ‘How does it feel right now?’ Beth said.

  ‘Okay,’ said Alice. ‘Okay, thanks.’ And then she paused. ‘Thanks for coming,’ she said, and paused again. ‘Beth.’

  The breeze rose again, out of nowhere, lifting a plastic bag off the bank, making it roll across the grass, crackling and cackling. The hood of Alice’s jacket flapped against her back, filling with air so that, for a moment, it looked quite round and solid. In the distance Beth could hear voices, though they seemed very far away. Alice’s head was still craned back, and her mouth slightly open, showing the edge of her straight white teeth.

  ‘Look at them,’ said Alice. ‘All those stars.’

  And Beth did, tilting her head right back again. It was true. There were so many of them, blinking in the sky, scattered across it in clusters. They seemed reflected in the water too, alive in there, moving around.

  ‘And the moon,’ said Alice. ‘So white!’

  She said it with great emphasis—so white—and it occurred to Beth that she could just as well be talking about herself. So white! She felt a rush of relief—was that what it was?—move out from her chest, right down to her fingertips. No matter. No matter—even that everything was falling apart. There were stars all around them, in the waters at their feet, high above their heads, and the moon seemed just to have been thrown in for good measure. It was new—the moon—so slim and pale, and it looked quite out of place amongst the stars, like a shard of bone half eaten away.

  Michael’s Fasting

  for Christmas

  It was the third most traumatic experience in your life. That’s what Amy read in a magazine. Coming in, in third place after death and divorce—bronze medal, not a winner but not a loser either—was moving house. Such an ordinary, everyday experience, but there it was, in the top three. Amy wondered if they had asked the Africans. Did this survey include the Africans too? She thought a lot about them these days. Not as much as when she was a kid and her mother used them as an example for why she should eat all her dinner, and also for why she couldn’t have ice cream for afternoon tea, but quite a lot all the same. Do the African children have ice cream? Amy’s mother used to say to her, knowing full well that she knew the answer. Maybe all the guilt had got into her head like some poor soggy Catholic.

  Anyway, being starving but still alive was probably more traumatic than moving house. If Amy could find out who had conducted the survey, she would send that to them in a letter. She could get it printed on a teeshirt. She could start a campaign. She thought about it all afternoon, and then she realised something. She couldn’t do any of these things; she couldn’t because she was just as bad as the rest; she couldn’t because at the moment when she read the statistic, standing in the checkout queue in the supermarket, she had thought to herself, No. No, she had thought, Christmas should be there in third place. Just like the true middle-class girl she was, she had thought instantly of trauma and Christmas.

  She had remembered the Africans later.

  That was the year that Michael fasted. That’s probably why it was on Amy’s mind, Christmas that is, because it was the 22nd of December; the countdown was well underway. The next day her mother called her at work, on the direct line that was reserved for emergencies. That’s what Amy told her, anyway.

  ‘Well, he’s fasting,’ she said. No hello, how are you. No explanation, just straight in there, as if she was picking up on a conversation that had been left off mid-thread.

  Amy was sorting the papers on her desk into piles, most important to least. She bit at her fingernail.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Michael,’ her mother said definitively. ‘He’s fasting. For Christmas.’

  There was a pregnant pause, and Amy heard a little puff of breath coming down the phone line. She felt as if it could hit her in the ear, like spit.

  ‘What do you mean he’s fasting?’

  ‘He’s fasting,’ her mother said again. ‘Some health kick. It’s a ten-day one, and he says he won’t stop, not even for Christmas dinner. Meredith called me in tears.’

  Meredith was Amy’s oldest sister. She got weepy a lot. It was her allergies, apparently.

  Amy let out a cynical snort and leaned back in her chair.

  ‘Well, I think that’s hilarious,’ she said.

  ‘Hilarious?’ her mother said. ‘The Stroms are coming this year, and Grandma and Grandpop. Hilarious? Amy, you really do have a warped sense of humour.’ Her voice quavered a little as she said it, but not in an irritable way; she sounded almost admiring.

  ‘Maybe he’s trying to be Christ,’ Amy said, chewing on her fingernails, staring absent-mindedly out the window.

  ‘Trying to be nice?’ her mother said. ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

  ‘No—Christ.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ her mother said wistfully, suddenly calm, disinterested, the excitement of the gossip seeming to have drained her. ‘Yes, maybe.’

  *

  Meredith had met Michael six months after her divorce from Jeff (life trauma no. 2, according to the New Woman magazine).

  She had started seeing him almost immediately.

  He took such good care of himself, she told Amy once, and when she said it Amy imagined a man who wore beige pants and boat shoes and washed his hands with a fragrant moisturising soap. That wasn’t what Michael was at all; that wasn’t quite the care Meredith had been talking about. It was more an inner sort of cleanliness that he was into, polishing organs instead of shoes, that sort of thing.

  He owned a Water Alkaliser that had cost a thousand dollars, and a juicer that swallowed lemons whole, transforming them into a milky liquid that was as good as doing a six-week liver cleanse, according to Michael. Meredith, who was only thirty-two, but who had somehow started to lose her lustre, took on a certain pre-pubescent glow once he started feeding her his concoctions. Amy’s mother noticed it too, but put it down to new love, or something. After Jeff, she said, any man with hairs on his chest would do the trick, no matter who he was or what he was into. Amy wa
s inclined to agree, about Jeff anyway, but she didn’t know if love had ever improved her skin that much. She even got Meredith to send her a pamphlet on Colloidal Silver, which was the latest advance in health technology, apparently.

  The peculiar thing was that despite all the inner vacuuming Michael did, he didn’t look that much the better for it. He was a good ten years older than Meredith, and maybe compared to other forty-somethings he was doing okay, but there was something about him that wasn’t quite right. His skin had a yellowish tinge, like he was always standing under fluorescent lights, and it seemed to be pulled tight across his shaved head: tight as a drum, almost parched, like the skin of a mummy.

  When Amy said that to her mother, she’d taken it quite the wrong way.

  ‘Well motherhood is very hard,’ she’d said, ‘but considering that I’ve probably lost my looks for you, I don’t think you should go around shouting the fact from the rooftops.’

  ‘No,’ Amy said. ‘A mummy. A dead one.’

  ‘Oh,’ her mother said, ‘those.’

  *

  The drive from Amy’s house to her parents’ took an hour and a half. They had wanted her to go up on Christmas Eve so they could do stockings on the end of the bed, just like when she was small, but she said no, using the traffic as a suitably safety-conscious excuse.

  Ben had flown out at 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve. His family liked to celebrate Christmas at different geographical sites each year. For the last one they’d gone to some mountain on the Volcanic Plateau, and worn Santa hats on the tramp up there. There was a photo of them all garbed up, eating turkey sandwiches, sitting cross-legged around a gingham cloth spread across the dust. This year they were going to a lake, were going to have smoked trout and pavlova out of a chilly bin, sitting right out in the middle of the water in a family friend’s boat.

  Ben tried to pretend it wasn’t fun, for her sake.

  ‘Have a Merry Christmas,’ he’d said to her, standing in the wind outside the airport, holding her hand in a non-committal way.