Like the very ends of the earth out there, Fynn says.
Like the afterlife …? I edge in, and I can tell from how he looks at me that he doesn’t remember ever saying that, that he thinks I’m taking the piss. None of us are quite drunk enough to not be embarrassed by this, so I refill our glasses and we drink to our sister, whose sense of humor we incrementally destroyed.
The bottle makes seven or eight rounds before it’s drained, and by that stage Ti has tapped out, her sturdy brown legs drawn up beneath her on the couch, her dark hair curtaining her from our nonsense.
Without her voice to anchor us there comes a drift, a silence so big and awful that it could be holding anything, but I know what’s lurking within. I try to head it off with small talk, but Fynn just nods. Here it comes, I think. Here it is.
You’ve seen him around, I s’pose?
Who?
Fynn shakes his head, as if I’m the coward.
Yeah. I see him sometimes. Not all that often.
And?
Look. Fynn. There’s nothing I can tell you that’s going to make you feel less shitful about it. Last year I saw him at the Farmers’ Arms, and he looked like a man whose wife and kids had died five years ago. A few months back I saw him at the post office, and he looked like a man whose wife and kids had died six years ago. What else is there to say?
It happened in a heartbeat. In a glisk, Fynn has since said. Swerving to miss the dog that came trotting out of the scrub. Swinging his ute into the oncoming lane, into the oncoming sedan. Just a glisk, then. And the safety barrier just for show, apparently, eaten through by salt air and melting away like bad magic at the first kiss of fender.
I met a woman, Fynn says. Sweet clever type from the library. When I’d stay with her overnight, there’d be the sound of her kids running around the house in the morning. Sound of them laughing downstairs or talking in funny voices to the cat. It was too much, Raf. I couldn’t tell her. And I couldn’t stay.
I keep looking for something, my brother goes on. Something that’ll fill up this scooped-out place but drink doesn’t do it. Sex doesn’t do it. I walk, I walk a great fucking lot, and the wind there wants to rip you open, but it isn’t enough. I’ll think maybe I can lose it in a roomful of people, like it’ll be made to seem smaller somehow, but no, it’s like everyone can all already see it, smell it on me.
I make to recharge our glasses, then remember there’s nothing to recharge them with.
You want to know the best it gets? Really, the best it gets?
Come on, I tell him, get your stupid jacket.
I’m further over than he is but I know the last thing he wants is a steering wheel to hold. I climb in the driver’s side of Ti’s Golf, fix the mirrors while Fynn hides his eyes behind a pair of aviators.
You don’t want those. Anyway, you still look like you, just more of an arsehole. Everyone looks like an arsehole in aviators.
Right, he says, flinging them into the lantana.
Since Fynn left, some Perth kids came down and reopened the Kingfisher Hotel. The smoke-damaged collection of taxidermied birds that made it through the 2009 fire—suspected arson—are still roosting about the liquor shelves. The fiber optic thing is still there, the pool table is still there. But the bar’s been refitted, a big slab of reclaimed red gum, and behind it the top-tier stuff is seven tiers up, and the bartender has to put down his copy of the DSM-5 or whatever and hop a ladder to get to it.
These boys don’t know Fynn. These boys will pour him his drink without asking just how he likes being back home.
We take bar seats opposite a singed black cockatoo, its glassy eye on the rum selection. Fynn wins the wallet race, the leather split like overripe pawpaw, gaping fifties.
You need to carry all that around?
From the Travelex. I closed all my accounts when I left Australia.
You really weren’t planning on coming back, huh.
Guess I wasn’t.
There are Fynn’s hands, threaded mangrove-like around his glass. Roughened by work that has nothing to do with him, work that carries nothing of himself. In my shed there’s a second table and a set of chairs and a bookshelf. In February it heats up to a million degrees in there—six bloody summers—all the wood has buckled and split along the joins, the wires gone slack or snapped, all that careful tension ruined. I should have kept them in the house. I should have driven into Perth this morning, been there waiting when he hefted his bag off the luggage carousel. Now it’s all I can do to lift my pint glass and meet his.
Lang may yer lum reek, Fynn says, rs rolling all over the place.
And may the mice never weep in your pantry, or whatever.
Close enough—where’d you turn that up, now?
Oh, y’know. I shrug and swallow beer froth. Scooped it out of the punnet.
Fynn grins down into his collar. Can ya move the Camira? I need to get the Torana out to get to the Commodore.
And the laughter that finally finds us feels very frail, but true enough, an echo rippling from the thousand family dinners spinning off lines from the same stupid shows while Mum cracked up in spite of herself, and Dad threatened to drive us out into the bush and lose us.
Of course the guy was always going to appear, company cap pulled low, eyes shaded from the glare of pool table fluorescents. It takes him a moment—I see it, my brother sees it—to register that it’s really Fynn sitting here, and when he does it’s as if all the doors have blown open at once, the air pressure changes that fast. And if the glasses in their corral don’t shatter, and the stuffed birds don’t take flight … if the tables don’t upend of their own accord, it’s only because of the steadying hand someone puts on the fella’s shoulder, guiding him back to the game, to his shot, to the rip of felt as he jabs too hard with the cue, the crack of the white against the five and the grinding roll in the belly of the table as the ball is captured there.
’Shot, someone says.
Fynn is already fumbling at the zip on his jacket.
Sit down, I tell him. Finish your drink.
Raf, we can’t stay here.
Well, I’m finishing mine. I take a long, purposeful swallow to show him.
Fynn doesn’t reach for his. Is he looking?
Christ, I’m not looking to see if he’s looking.
I can’t just sit here and pretend like … I should go say something.
What’s to say? I told you, there’s nothing. Just finish your drink, for fuck’s sake. (When what I’d meant to say was: Brother. Be still. We’re okay here.)
Fynn sits down, visibly shrinking inside the jacket’s bulk. I watch this, and I don’t know what good I’m trying to force. Or even if it’s good.
Right, I tell him, setting my glass beside his. You’re right. Jiggety-jig.
The way home is all roadkill and future roadkill—scarpering night creatures—streaking through the high beams. Bundles of fluff and mashed feathers at the side of the road.
Acquitted, I remind him. Everyone knew it was not his intention to run three quarters of a family off a sandstone bluff. Everyone understood that. At least officially.
Okay, yes, it’s awful, it’s tragic, but it wasn’t your fault.
How much quiet is there before Fynn clears his throat and goes, Listen. Raf? There never was any dog.
I say, How do you mean, no dog? Because I had seen the dog. Just as clearly as if I’d been riding shotgun for that nightmare. Fynn’s described it a hundred times—that mongrely, greyhoundish thing, ribs on display through its sorry sack of gray skin. The way it skittered out of the scrub like a wraith. Looking over its scrawny shoulder, as though something back there had spooked it senseless.
There just wasn’t. I don’t … Can we leave it at that?
No, I think. No, we cannot leave it at that. But I drive the dark highway and keep quiet. Where had it gone then, the dog? Fynn had looked for it, in the first hundred versions of the story. He’d stood at the mangled safety barrier and dialed triple ze
ro—that part is fact; that part is on the record—and wondered, moronically, he said, where the fucking dog had got to. Because I wanted to kick it. His right knee bloody and ragged from where it had been crushed up against the ignition. A BAC of 0.03. Two beers, sober enough. This is also on the record.
If not the dog?
I roll us in, silent, to the driveway. Past Fynn’s rental car, which has been tipped up on its side, exposing its shiny undercarriage. We get out and stand beside it without speaking for a moment, the air full of insect and sprinkler music.
Happens all the time, I lie. It’s what these kids out here tip instead of cows.
How many people would that take?
Probably doesn’t weigh much more than a cow. Should we flip it back?
It only takes a halfhearted shove. The car lands with a crunch that brings about a flurry of curtain movement all up and down the street but nothing breaks and no one yells. The passenger door is scraped up and the wing mirror is cactus.
Insurance?
Fynn just breathes in long and deep through his nose.
No way it’s connected, this and the blokes at the bar. They were still there when we left. Just one of those freak coincidences. I’m saying all this to Fynn and he’s saying nothing.
Inside, Ti has left the couch made up with sheets and pillows, and laid the coffee table—Fynn’s coffee table—with a glass of water and a pack of aspirin.
Keeper, Fynn says, with a smile so pissweak I have to tell him g’night.
Ti gives a little moan as I slide in with her, fit my knees into the backs of hers. My chest against her spine, face pushed into her hair. Her hair smells like the ocean. I slide my hand between her thighs, not really to start something, just to be there, and we stay tangled like that, drifting nearer to and farther from sleep, until headlights flood the room.
It’s nearly 3 a.m. when he shows up, swaying out there on the lawn. The father, the widower. So drunk he’s practically dancing, a boxer or bear.
He pounds the door fit to unhinge it, but his voice is surprisingly soft when he says, It’s not right. It’s not right that it’s me coming to you.
No, I hear Fynn answer. I know it’s not.
There’s the click of the screen door as he steps onto the veranda, before I can tell him, Don’t. Don’t say shit. About the dog. About the complete lack of dog. He doesn’t need to know. Don’t say a damn word.
I drag the sheet with me into the hallway, holding it around my waist. Through the flywire I watch the two of them cross the lawn towards the street, then farther on into the night air, away from the house. Away from help. My brother wading out into the dark and the dark folding over the top of him like a wave. No right thing now, no best thing. Nothing so easy as lifting a child onto his shoulders and carrying her safely above the grabbing sea.
Real Life
It’s Blind Willie McTell playing when they carry her out. “I Got to Cross the River Jordan,” one of the later, elliptical versions, where he lets the guitar finish half his lines. Nobody can … but Lord I got to … in that cold clay. Later I’ll get snagged on the morbid coincidence of this and Jody will shrug it off as nothing, point out that pretty much any blues number from his late father’s collection would have seemed fitting. Maybe so. But in the moments before Madame Ayliffe’s door swings open, before the paramedics shuffle onto the far end of our shared balcony and I know to feel otherwise, the McTell song seems assertive, almost joyous, and I’m happy just to be out here, bare-shouldered, tapping the scissors on my thigh to keep time.
Saturday afternoon, the sun sinking into skin like teeth into kitten-scruff. Everyone placid with it, eyes narrowed to dreamy slits. I’m out here cutting Jody’s hair, Jody docile in a foldout chair with his forearms resting on the balcony railing, head tipped forward so that the snippings fall over the side and are scattered before they reach the courtyard three stories below.
Birds’ll make nests of that, he says.
Not if they have any self-respect.
On the balcony beneath ours, the Yukon Jack girls. Somehow they manage to put that stuff away by the case, just the two of them. Their arguments, along with their heat, rose up through our floorboards all winter. Now they’re a sprawl of legs and magazines. The Husky One and the Unhusky One. We pass them all the time on the stairs. Nodding hello like we never hear them threatening each other, or talking dirty. The ventilation broadcasts everything, indiscriminately, from the weather to sports commentaries to new slang for pussy and whore.
Jody’s listening now while I cut, transfixed by what can be seen of the girls’ bare feet, toes painted fluorescent orange, curled simian around their balcony rails. An outflung arm fanning a copy of Elle Quebec. But they only speak to each other in cool transactions. Just Donne-moi le! and Bouge ta jambe!, and the sound of ice being rummaged around inside a cooler. Nothing juicy or vocabulary boosting.
These first sleeveless days have slunk in late, a full week into May, no less, where we and everyone else have been waiting to pounce on them with dirty laundry and spritzed Aperol. When Jody rode up from Louisiana he was brown and gnarled with odd muscle he’d gained working on his uncle’s bowfishing charter. There were scratches from the baby ice-box alligator still crosshatching his arms. But five months lived in artificial light have left him just as soft and harrowed-looking as the rest of us in Montreal. No one can stand to be inside today, least of all him. Everyone’s out here showing their paled limbs, their unscarved throats, sunning themselves like anemic reptiles. Ash branches are flashing new shoots, gaudy as kids’ jewelry. On someone’s radio they’re warning rain, a real spring soaker, but no one can believe that from here.
Only a fortnight ago the ice rinks were still melting. Already the slackliners have taken over, rigging up their webs all through Parc La Fontaine and wavering from tree to tree with arms outstretched. Already the work crews have been dispatched to patch up roads that fissured open during the deep freeze.
Yesterday I passed a freshly paved square of sidewalk outside the Pharmaprix. A woman had pulled up her stroller and was pressing her baby’s bare feet into the wet cement. Holding him under the arms and sort of dabbing him into the gray paste, while he shrieked in glee, though it was then only 12 degrees in the sun.
Put some shoes on that kid, I almost said but didn’t. I suppose some small, still unbitter part of me recognized that most of us have to take posterity where we can get it.
This apartment is an old one, its radiators mummified under several decades of paint, murmuring like pigeons or clanking like geese, depending on the hour. Marie, my former roommate, took all the curtains with her, and the living room became a big glowing terrarium for anyone who cared to look up from the street. Some of her things still haunt the rooms; enough to sleep on, sit in, cook with, drink from. There’s a recipe for banana crepes in her handwriting, taped inside one of the kitchen cupboard doors, and the bathroom cabinet still smells faintly of her vitamin C. The lease is good until Canada Day, which Montreal reassigns as Moving Day and celebrates by hauling furniture up and down treacherous external stairwells in drenching heat. When July rolls around I can either sell this stuff on to the next tenants, or post it online, or I can chop it all down into matchsticks and toss them into the alleyway: Marie said she really couldn’t give a shit.
It wasn’t anything personal. As the city shook its fiery coat of leaves a dread had crept into Marie’s heart, curled up snug, and refused to budge. Midway through October she dropped out of Life Sciences and then out of Quebec.
Marie believed she was blessed, and who knows, maybe she was. As a parting gift she blessed me a thumbprint-sized piece of scallop shell and told me it would lead me to providence. I carried it around in my coat pocket the rest of fall and into winter, worrying at it until all the ridges had worn down and it was fingernail-smooth. How many years of ocean, of tumbling waves would that have taken? I felt mighty as the sea, having worn it down like that with only my nervous energy. Now what? I would�
�ve asked Marie, but by then she had moved back to Renfrew. I was alone with the sound of the radiator and other lives coughing through the walls.
Now and then my mother called from not-even-Oshawa, sounding more and more, to my sharpening ear, like a complete hoser. This appraisal treacherously failed to acknowledge her raising me on Anne Carson and Japanese stoneware and black lava salt, tastes that could only just be sustained with a single, part-time income in public health. She had looked into a lot of hideous mouths to see me through McGill, as she was so fond of reminding me. I’d taken a gap year in Mexico, followed by a second gap year nurturing an acquired taste for eighties telenovelas, and finally my mother said that if I didn’t use the tuition money to learn something she was going to take her girlfriend to see the Panama Canal.
But I, too, dropped out of university, out of Life Sciences. In a misjudged effort at gratitude, I held out until mid-November: two weeks past the refund deadline. Making a farewell round of the preserved sea creatures and fetuses lined up in jars, their eyes and nostrils still sealed, I decided not to tell my mother, not yet. (I could pay her back, I promised her, inwardly. She would escape to Panama, after all.) I stayed on in the city, picking up a job folding towels and refreshing rooms at a fancy day spa I could never have afforded to visit. It was the best I could do, and maybe a little better than I could do. I might have fared all right in France, but I barely had enough French to be a waitress here.
The job meant waking at 6:45 every weekday. The apartment next door would already be lit up with French radio. Proof of life over there, behind the complex alarm system that seemed excessive and out of place in our semi-decrepit graystone. Just what are they fortifying? I wondered. Meth lab. Snuff set. Storehouse for rare smuggled reptiles. But as far as I could tell the sole occupant was a flossy old thing who rarely left her apartment. We shared a balcony, though, and once or twice I’d seen her out there, wind lifting her hair to show a high forehead of dark-veined porcelain, the exiled contessa of some vanished nation. The first time we exchanged words, she’d shuffled out wearing only a quilted paisley housecoat to glare towards the mountain. Nearly all of the leaves had fallen from the trees, and now the view was clear to the lurid cross.
Here Until August Page 2
