‘Well, have a good time,’ Graham says. He waves his compo envelope at his front door. ‘I better get back to it.’
As he re-enters his house, Graham feels the cool, conditioned air cling to his skin and for once the relief is mixed. The darkness of his house has always appealed to him, but now it seems gloomy. He seeks the glow of the computer.
No one has messaged him in the last six minutes.
At the top of the screen, the countdown blinks gently. It’s formatted like the countdown of a televised football game. Graham designed it himself. It counts down the seconds, the estimated seconds, until his death.
There are still eight digits. It’s in accord with his doctor’s last prognosis. It could be sooner. It could be much later. He might go into extra time.
He does keep busy, though not in the ordinary way. He keeps his mind off his future with thoughts about his past. Graham has no cataracts of the past. There are certain times he sees with perfect clarity, times like his last day at work.
It was a bright day, bright like many days here, and, although he was working inside, behind perfectly good blinds, he chose that day to raise them. He chose that day to gaze out at the well-lit plant. He stunned himself with the glare of the sun, so that when he looked back at his monitor, he didn’t see the warning light at first.
A spill. A little spill.
The system had other safety nets. He was never found culpable, or negligent. He wasn’t even summoned to the inquest.
All his job required of him was to raise the alarm. To press a few keys and alert someone he’d never met, someone who might not even be a person but a mechanism. Instead he watched the light on his screen flashing gently, and it calmed him.
Graham looks at this memory for a short time every day, takes it out and handles it. Every day he tries to find a crack in it, but each time he fails. The surface of his conscience is as smooth and unbroken as a fresh egg, or the inside of a glass.
Outside, the neighbour’s children begin to scream.
An innocent man
Mike leaves his house dressed in a blue coat, white pants, boots, a white sash, and epaulettes, his sword by his side. He hums as tunelessly as a wasp.
His small son watches Mike march down the footpath.
‘Could have been worse,’ says the boy’s mother. ‘Could have been trains.’
‘Can I wear Spiderman?’ the boy says.
‘Spiderman’s in the wash.’
She peeks out into the street as she closes the front door. A black van passes the edge of her block, like a slow-crawling beetle, and she shakes her head. This used to be a nice neighbourhood.
The General collects Mike at precisely twelve noon, as promised. They drive out to a big park, where they unload their weapons and carry them to a place behind a hill. From here, the city skyline can only be seen through a curtain of trees.
This is Mike’s third battle. The General has been doing this for years. It’s always the Napoleonic Wars, but the battles change.
Today the men separate into groups. The enemy, the Prussian side, hike to the north. The General takes the rest across to the east, leaving Mike and one other man behind some bushes on the way to await orders. The strategy is the same as last week: split up and outflank the other team.
Mike waits with his teammate, a reserved tech-support worker named Alan who is dressed, like him, in a blue coat, and also carries a sword. Alan has told him that he had the sword specially made by a friend. The friend has a forge in his backyard. Last week Alan gave Mike the guy’s number and suggested that Mike might want to upgrade his sword to something ‘a little more period’. Mike got his sword from an army disposal store in the city. It’s not exactly right for the Napoleonic Wars, but Mike thinks he got a pretty good deal.
The General is supposed to come over the next hill and signal them to move on the other team, who are approaching from the north. Without the signal, they can’t act, and they know the Prussians will be ambushing them soon.
The General is late. Mike watches a trail of black ants crawl through the grass at his feet until he can bear it no longer.
‘Couldn’t we just phone him? Something might have happened to them.’
Alan looks at Mike incredulously. ‘Phone him? In 1812? I don’t think so.’
‘Don’t you think rules can be compromised for the sake of . . . of the social good?’ Mike says, dredging up an undergraduate language he thought he had forgotten. It seems like the right way to talk to Alan, who seems like an undergraduate.
‘It would be inauthentic for me to have an opinion about that,’ his companion says. ‘Anarchism hasn’t been invented yet.’
‘Neither have digital watches,’ Mike points out.
His companion pulls his sleeve down.
‘I don’t want to discuss theory with you. I want to defeat Prussia.’
Mike goes quiet and watches the ants. Alan is right. The re-enactment of history is a genetic imperative. It’s just like the social insects. In a swarm, the individual is replaceable, but not meaningless. Meaning is only derived from context. It is existence outside the hive which is meaningless. History has no requirement for the individual, only the swarm. Mike thinks the individual is a recent invention, possibly an anomaly.
Mike was always interested in history, but he dropped out in second year to focus on biology. He works in the lab of a big biochemistry company. His wife suggested that he join the office soccer team, but since Mike doesn’t like sports or his co-workers very much he shrugged off the idea. He found this group on the internet one afternoon when he was supposed to be writing up statistics, and sent them a quick email.
To his surprise, the General got back to him within minutes, attaching an application form and list of equipment, including contact details for suppliers. The General has a day job too. Mike doesn’t know what it is, but he’s sure he executes it with the same abrupt efficiency.
This is why he is so concerned that they have not received their orders. If something has happened, if the General has been called to a family emergency, for example, he will have taken the car with him. Mike lives in an outer suburb with bad public transport. He could ask Alan how he got here, but he doesn’t want to risk another lecture on authenticity.
A sharp V of fighter planes zooms overhead, chased by a sonic wake like the compressed buzz of a million bees. It must be a display flight, thinks Mike, patriotic garbage for kids to encourage them to join up when they’re old enough. Romantic visions of participating in some real historic moment might have led him here, crouched behind a bush with a tech-support worker on a Saturday afternoon. But when he searches his mind, he finds no desire for a pivotal role. If he had lived in nineteenth-century France he probably would have been a cheesemaker, or the guy who sold cheap swords in a dimly lit second-hand shop. At best a common soldier. Mike is satisfied with this lack of ambition, because it supports his social theory.
There is a short bang, like a car backfiring.
‘Bloody hell,’ Alan says. ‘Would you look at that.’
One of the planes has dropped out of the neat V and begun to dive. It appears that the pilot has lost control; perhaps one of its engines has misfired. The plane stutters and lifts itself back into the sky with the elegance of a blowfly. There are more short, sharp bangs, irregular, like popcorn. Mike is sure he can hear vaudeville gasps and cheers from the other side of the park, and remembers the General.
‘I’m going to go over there myself and see what’s keeping them,’ he tells Alan, who shrugs and does not get up. The planes disappear into the blue haze.
Walking alone in his costume past the deserted children’s playground, Mike feels foolish. He wishes his son was with him, dressed as Spiderman. The boy isn’t able to go out much these days; the alert level has been orange since the attacks, which means it’s not sup
posed to be safe for women and children any more. But Mike chooses to take the directives lightly.
When he sees the men lying between the trees up ahead, Mike begins to run.
The men lie splayed in their blue coats in the lush grass, like a still from a period film. The bright sunshine gives them hard, dark shadows. The image distracts him for a moment. As Mike picks his way between the trees, he realises he should yell out to them. He can’t remember the General’s real name, but when he reaches him it no longer matters. The man is dead. They are all dead. Red on blue on green.
The stillness is disrupted by the planes, coming back for another pass. Mike throws himself on the ground and rolls against the nearest body. Strangely clear-headed, he pulls the dead man over himself and lies suffocated in the dark of the other man’s coat. The body is still warm.
Gunfire hitting the earth is not vaudeville, not popcorn, it vibrates through the ground and he closes his eyes like his son: if I can’t see you, you can’t see me. The planes drone away and he lies there for a long time, until he thinks it is over. He rolls the weight off him, glances at the man’s face. He does not recognise him. Only the General has lists of who these men are, their families, where they live.
He remembers the car keys and crawls over to the General’s body, feels in his pockets. Gulping against the smell of fresh blood, he finds the keys. He sheds his own coat, and thinks about pulling it over the General’s face, but stops himself. He drops it on the ground and backs away. He has left his sword beside the man he used for cover.
Mike walks as calmly as he is able across the park. They will have the area under surveillance; he must look innocent. He knows he should return to Alan, find the Prussian team, call the police and report the bodies. Instead he makes a beeline for the public toilet, walks inside and checks his face for blood. His shirt is stained, so he removes it, and wishes he could shed the period trousers as well. He washes his hands and face. He glances up at the cctv camera, but someone has smashed it.
He walks into the sunshine and feels a sudden urge to return to the dead men, check their pulses. Perhaps it was just an act, perhaps the Prussians got there first and even now the men are standing, wiping tomato sauce from their faces, and discussing next week’s battle.
His mind is still seeking a reasonable explanation as the car park comes into sight. It is full of police cars and the unmarked black vans used by the military police. He can see the distant red jackets of the Prussian team as they are bundled into these vehicles. He wants to cry out, explain to them that this is a game, that no harm was meant, but a sudden suspicion stops him. They don’t just shoot people like this. There must have been more to the group than he thought. Only the innocent have nothing to fear.
So Mike turns back, cuts south through the trees, and runs until he comes to a stormwater drain at the edge of the park. A couple are walking across the other side, pushing a pram, and they look at him with suspicion as he marches along the bank. He glares at them, checking their appearance; they look normal enough. The baby smiles, the moment of mutual suspicion seems ridiculous, and Mike waves at them with a grin. They walk more briskly.
He will follow this drain to the sea, come out somewhere different, an ordinary man on a beach, and call his wife from a payphone. They will gather their things and move to a better neighbourhood, perhaps another state. They will pull the boy out of preschool.
Mike shakes his head. They will stay in their home. He has done nothing wrong. He is an innocent man, and he will be safe.
As Mike walks along the bank of the algae-ridden drain, he thinks about slime mould. Slime mould is the earliest evolution of complex life. It is a cluster of tiny organisms, but it behaves like a single animal. At university he studied the way the micro-organisms communicate with each other, with a biochemical process. He wrote his honours thesis on it. The social insects work the same way, he thinks, and so does the human brain. The re-enactment of history must be a genetic imperative.
This algae is a pollutant. It has taken over the whole river system. But it has no will, no centre, only a sum of hungers. He sees a spill of orange growing under a bridge, the colour of the alert, bright and sucking, and thinks how strange it is that life can take on the appearance of rust.
Unconditional love
I stash the baby in a corner of the lot. It’s shaded by a canopy of rusty corrugated iron, what’s left of an old shed. In this humidity the bent roof only contains the heat. Blackberry bushes, their swelling green fruits shedding petals, cling to my jeans. I step away but the baby starts to moan, making an awful grinding in its throat.
Fine, I mutter, and drag the pram backwards through the blackberries. They shed their petals like confetti. The sky spits and then gives up. The heat presses into my back. I smell shit and pollution. A pram wheel sticks. Fuck, I say over the baby, and manage to pull and push it back across the lot, over the weeds, around half-bricks sunk in the ground, half-buried.
In the park across the street there’s a public toilet, left unlocked. I push the baby inside and rummage in the bottom of the pram for a clean nappy. Thank fuck they’re disposables. I change it on the cold steel bench. It doesn’t cry. I go for a piss in the stall. When I swing the door open the pram is still there. No one’s going to take it away, not now, not here. I push it back out into the vicious light.
Church, I need a church or something, but along the main street there’s only chip shops and bait shops, a shut down service station now a warehouse for junk furniture, the hardware chain with the sign, we sharpen knives. I think of water. No one on the street, but a few women in the bakery, kids in the chip shop thrusting into video games, up against the wall. No one looks at me, a woman struggling with a pram, an ordinary sight.
I’m glad. I push the baby past the shops and down a side street towards the bay. I push it as far as the boat ramp. Concrete presses heat up through the soles of my shoes, which are worn down from walking. The water glares at me, a harsh grey light somehow brighter than the sky. The baby grunts and squirms. It moves its arm up over its head as if to wave. If it wakes will it recognise me?
We slept curled up together, the baby sated with formula, some compound made in a laboratory. Biology is over. I held the baby like an egg, frightened I’d roll on it. Crush it alive. I lay awake in the stickiness of my sweaty clothes. I didn’t take off my shoes in case I had to get out quickly. In the night my sweat was so thick it might have been blood.
It didn’t cry. The baby doesn’t cry.
It is a he but I can’t get around that yet. I think I wanted a girl. Did I want a girl? I never wanted a baby. I wanted this baby. This precise life and capacity.
In the morning I passed the pram back out the window, lifted the baby through and placed it in its warm hollow, then hoisted myself onto the sill and dropped out after it. It didn’t wake. Nobody saw us. This town doesn’t bother watching. The building wasn’t even boarded up.
This place, I know the name, remembered why I knew it soon after I got here. I don’t know what reminded me. The car left by the roadside, rear windscreen shattered; the sign on the hardware; the ache in the light. It’s a perfect, preoccupied little coastal town, close enough to the city to have people come and go. It’s all I want.
Must be ten years since they found the bodies buried in that bloke’s backyard. The bloke’s in jail now, but the town’s still looking for him. Their looking hangs in the smog, belched out by the cannery smokestacks. It encloses the place somehow, as if its contentment is conditional on this one bit of history. A love built on punishment.
I stand at the edge where the water lap-laps at the grubby shore. It’s only a weedy inlet where the slow boats trawl out – second-rate water for second-rate recreation. I thought of the water but now I am not so sure. Five minutes ago I would have left it in the vacant lot, but something didn’t sit. I have to find the right alignment, the right opportu
nity. It is in my hands for just this reason, a happy chance.
I can still hear mothers on the train, mothers on telephones and in supermarkets. Come here little man, put that down, we don’t do this, we do that, we’ll get ice cream, and the little men look into their mothers’ enormous faces, flattened by birth pain into some half-won serenity, and are amazed. Will it look at me like that when it opens its eyes? It’s so small, hardly awake, hardly alive yet, a fish. Will I include it in a We that excludes all others? Can we drown in ourselves, the imprint of ourselves?
A car pulls up. Some local with a boat trailer starts backing his dinghy into the grey water. The beige four-wheel drive seems too slick for him. I nod at him and he gives me a small wave. When he gets out of the car he ambles over and leans his head over the pram.
Doo doo doo, he says to the baby.
It makes some half-awake manoeuvre that charms him and he bends up to face me.
Sweet, he says.
I squint at him, stretching my lips. He might be a grandfather.
How old is she? he asks.
Three months, I say, and smile.
His nod is reverent. I feel like crowing, waving my arms in a triumphal bird-dance. I anchor my fingers on the pram handle.
The man pauses. Small for her age, he says.
My smile freezes. It’s a boy, I say, frowning. I’m conscious of my hands on the pram. I want to put them on the baby somewhere, make a sign we are together, but I might not do it right. I might give myself away.
Judgement flickers across his eyes. He bends down to inspect the child. I’m glad he judges us. The baby and I belong to him, to everyone, the world.
Hello, little man, he says.
The baby has gone back to sleep. The man lingers in front of me, me and my son, the unit, discomfited by our closed circle. He has come close to look at the baby and now he’s standing too close for a stranger. I feel the sweat drip down my back.
The Rest is Weight Page 13
