Tarcutta Wake (4 page)

Belonging to Sonja

There are bloodstains on the mattress. Old bloodstains, dried to the colour of rust. She notices them when she strips the sheets off his bed for the first time. Kate stands at the end of the bed with the sheet in her hand. She knows the percentage of used mattresses in the world that do not have bloodstains must be a very small percentage. Still. One more thing belonging to Sonja, in a long list of things belonging to Sonja. Medication. Books. A winter coat. All the little traces of her in the bathroom cabinet; tampons, razors. All the little traces she left on him, the habits that stayed behind when she left. He won't do anything in fours. Won't remove a cricket from the house. The summer is thick with crickets and Kate can catch them in her hands now. Not even flinching at their dry bodies or the frantic little scratches on her palms as she carries them out to the yard.

He tells Kate it took a long time to end. It ended properly on the night that Sonja reached over from the passenger seat and grabbed the wheel so hard they nearly slammed into a Mercedes in the next lane. Though sometimes Kate's not sure if the story about grabbing the steering wheel is something he has told her, or something she was afraid to tell him. Either way, she feels like a story he has already heard. Kate remembers what it felt like to grab the wheel, to truly want the car to crash. She remembers what it felt like to throw herself against walls.

When Sonja left she took the cat and moved to a small apartment overlooking the park. Kate once lived alone with a cat in a small apartment overlooking a park. She once took the same medication as Sonja. When she runs out of razors she uses one of the razors Sonja left behind. She has tried on the winter coat and stood in front of the hallway mirror, her hands balled into fists in the pockets. The sleeves of the coat don't reach her wrists. She knows this isn't supposed to mean anything.

On the afternoons that Kate runs she does laps around the park, looking up at the windows of the surrounding apartment buildings. All the windows reflect the glare of the setting sun, so she can't see through them, but she feels that Sonja is behind one of them. Sitting very still with her knees drawn up to her chin and the cat beside her. Saying, Look. Just because you once lived alone with a cat in a small apartment overlooking a park. Just because you know what my blood looks like. Doesn't mean you know me.

Suitable for a lampshade

I got the call when I was too far away to do anything about it. There was a pile of marking to get through that I knew I wouldn't get through, but that had been the case even before the call.

I'd rented a holiday house from a friend of a friend. And they'd probably bought it and all its contents from the children of an elderly deceased lady, or of one who had recently been moved to an aged care facility, because the bookcases were still crammed with Reader's Digest omnibuses and craft books;
Advanced Macramé, Crocheted Endings.
Also the kitchen cupboards were stacked with earthenware plates and mismatched glassware and crockery, and these anodised aluminium cups that reminded me of the photographic version of my childhood, which is really nothing like the childhood I can actually remember.

The rent was only one hundred and twenty-five a week because I was a friend of a friend and because it was the middle of June. The wind came right off the Pacific to whine under the door sills and through the gaps between the old weatherboards, and to rattle the windows in their poorly made frames.

I'd gone there to dry out, from you as much as anything else. Okay, from you and only you, because I was still drinking and I had no intention of drying that out. Straight vodka or watered whisky out of the little blue anodised cups, which I considered taking with me when I left. It was inherited bric-a-brac, after all, and this friend of a friend hadn't had time to develop any real emotional attachment to any of it. So the cups, and to a lesser extent the books on crochet and macrame, and some sixties plastic swizzle sticks I'd found in the third kitchen drawer – I was already thinking of those things as mine.

I was trying not to think about you. I had all this work to do and I'd bought a pair of glasses with small lenses and thick frames so that only a limited amount of the world was in focus at any one time. I thought they might minimise peripheral distraction, help me keep my attention on what was in front of me. You probably know it didn't work out that way. But the glasses made me look like someone who drank Laphroaig instead of Jameson and worked from a typewriter instead of a laptop, and I liked that.

There was no good place to buy coffee near to the house, so there was no good reason to leave it. I made drink ice in the freezer of the ancient Kelvinator and read most of a book on anaesthesia that was written in the forties, and if those things didn't keep me happy they at least kept me a reasonable and safe distance from unhappy. I'd say anaesthetised, but that would be too obvious and not entirely true. I played chess and Scrabble against myself, and the essays on Jeffers and Riding stayed unread and unmarked on the kitchen table.

In the weeks I was there the sky never grew any lighter than the colour of bruised mushrooms, and if I drove to the ocean it was grey and hungry in the James Reeves sort of way. Maybe every second or third day I drove to the ocean and just sat in the driver's seat, watching the container ships crawling after each other so I could tell where the horizon was, though most days the sea was the same colour as the sky and if not for the ships you wouldn't have known any difference between the two.

Some afternoons there was a girl on the sand with her dog, a black wolfish mongrel she'd throw pieces of driftwood for. He churned the wet grey sand up under his paws, chasing after whatever she threw.

Yeah, I thought. I know how that is. I know exactly how.

And down on the beach the wind pulled at them, made their hair and her loose clothing ripple. Like the two of them were only shapes cut from cloth.

Cloth girl with her cloth dog. My fingers would always creep to the door handle but wouldn't push it down.

Yes, it was because she looked like you. There are worse reasons for wanting to talk to someone. Because they look like they have money, or they're beautiful or they look like somebody famous – those are worse reasons.

Anyway, it was because she reminded me of you that I finally got out of the car and went down to the beach to ask her about her dog, or whether she lived nearby or something similar. Maybe I asked if she knew a good place to get coffee. I don't remember what I asked because, whatever it was, she didn't answer it. She just pushed her hair off her face and asked if I was the one driving that blue Skyline. All her clothes were shapeless and only the wind whipping the fabric up close to her skin brought any kind of definition.

When I nodded she said, Yeah, I thought so, and threw a stick for the dog. Nobody just watches the ocean. Not in this weather.

I'm just watching the ocean, I said. The dog came back with the stick. Why, what are you doing in this weather?

I'm just walking my dog, she said. He doesn't give a damn about the weather. Sweet stupid thing, and she threw the stick again. Then she smiled and looked at me from behind her wind-whipped hair. Maybe, she said. Maybe you're just watching the ocean.

And I was still trying not to think about you, or the holiday house I'd once rented with you; its own mismatched glassware, or how we'd made love against kitchen benches and spat gin into each other's mouths. Carrying everything back out to the car on the morning we left, your tired grin above a box of groceries we hadn't managed to get through, or the carton of bottles that we had.

But it was no good and I remembered everything. The arguments, the ugly carpet. The way the sound of the hot water system found its way into our dreams and we dreamed of the same things for six nights. How the firewood had been cut from old railway sleepers, and the bolts glowed red hot among the embers. Sleeping in the car at the side of the highway on the way home. The trucks shuddering by and your breath clouding the window, the early light cold, almost blue, and oh god – if I could have kept things just like that. If I could have stopped time at the side of the Hume with you sleeping and your hair across your face and me just watching you sleeping, the trucks shuddering past. Well, you know I would have.

I think maybe the girl knew this. Maybe even knew that she reminded me of you, but she was good about it. Or she didn't have to be good about it, because she didn't care either way. Her dog lay on the wooden decking outside with his legs stretched out ahead of him, and when I said that he could come in she said, No, he can't, and he stayed out there, looking woeful. It seems strange to me now that I never learned the dog's name. It could have been Samson or Solomon, something biblical. The girl shook the rain out of her coat and left it by the door.

Then when the call came through, she was asleep on her stomach, her long legs still slightly parted and the damp sheet pulled up across the backs of her knees. I stumbled naked to the front room with the phone, not wanting to wake her, tripping over a powerboard, a lone shoe. When I answered my voice sounded thin and hostile. I stood looking out the window. The sky had grown dark and the dog had fallen asleep out on the decking. There was the pile of paperwork that had never left its manila folder, and your mother on the line asking why I hadn't answered the home phone or the work phone, why I hadn't returned any of her damn messages.

Three days, she said, and as she kept talking all I could think about was how I should have gotten out of the car that morning. I should have walked along the highway and thumbed a ride back to Melbourne with one of the truck drivers. Then you would still be asleep in the passenger seat. The light would still be almost blue, your hair just-so across your face, and this little cluttered house with its storm and its sleeping dog and its anodised aluminium cups would be a dream you were having. I would be standing naked at the window of the dream, watching the sky grow dark. There would be a box of groceries on your back seat, and you would be okay. You would be safe.

Your mother said
sudden.
She said
collapse,
she said
supermarket fucking car park,
and I don't remember how I answered any of that. I don't remember what I said before hanging up. Just that after I'd hung up, I pulled a book down from the shelf and turned to Chapter Three: Suitable for a lampshade, or a handkerchief. And how I just stood there with the book open at page sixty-two, waiting for those words to mean something.

Treacherous

Her clavicles. Once they jutted out so far you couldn't look at them without imagining treacherous mountain passes covered in snow, tiny armies marching down either side to a war in her suprasternal notch. Then she fleshed out a bit, and the war was over (more or less).

View

His eyes were not good. This didn't matter to him anymore. His eyes had once worked fine, and it had mattered when the deterioration began, but he had grown used to it since then. He could still see a little-colours and shapes without definition or depth. As if he were standing too close to an impressionist painting. When he stood looking out of the window of his front room, the mountains folded into each other like soft grey flannel, with no hint of abrasion or human interference. But he had lived in the same house for thirty years, and what his eyes could not see of the mountains his memory substituted, and he knew them to be scarred with walking tracks, quarried in places and blackened in others, weary with people. On the northwestern face there had once been a landslide. One snaggled ghost gum jutted slantways out of the bare rock, and he still thought it there, still wondered which way the roots grew and if bad weather would ever bring it down.

This was the view he had bought, along with the house, the property. The view remained unchanged throughout the birth, growth and eventual departure of his daughter, and throughout the illness and inevitable death of his wife. The house felt the emptiness of the past few years, and compensated for it by falling in on itself, but the view was still his. Even blindness would not take it from him.

Other senses had sharpened as his sight had failed. He knew by sound and smell how high the gas range was, could hear his daughter's car engine long before it reached the driveway. Alison came by three or four times a week with groceries, and to cook and freeze his meals. When his sight first began to weaken, and grew so weak that he could no longer read, she read aloud to him. Mostly newspaper articles or short stories by William Faulkner and Patrick White.

Too old now, he had said, to start learning Braille.

But she read too softly, and he complained that she did not own the words when she read them. Now she brought him audio books on cassette from the public library, some read by their authors and others by voice actors. Sometimes the stories were no good, or the voice of the reader did not fit that of the character. He would swear and shuffle over to the player to stop the tape before the end of the first chapter. But when the books were good, or when they were not very good but were read well, he would lean back in his chair with his eyelids closed, and he would see very clearly their Mississippi dust and Chickasaw chiefs, their woven nets and hardened women. He would forget his failed vision. Then when the side had ended and the voice stopped, he would open his eyes and see the mountains soft and grey as heaped ash and he would know that the softness was only an illusion, just a trick of his eyes. In his mind he would see the lone ghost gum, growing from the sheer wall of rock but resolute and still bearing leaves, and he would wonder which way the roots grew.

When his daughter was there he would ask her, Tell me about the view.

The mountains?

Yes. Tell me about the mountains. Tell me if anything's changed.

They look how they always have.

And that ghost gum?

It's still there. Nothing's changed.

Which way do you s'pose the roots grow?

Towards water, Dad.

Up or down? Or further in?

I couldn't tell you.

But it's still there?

I told you.

He would feel a strange relief trickle through him, slow-burning like peated whisky, and he could see then the scars of the walking tracks and remember walking them with Alison's mother through the blackened and quarried places when his eyes were still good and the summer crackled around them. He remembered Alison's mother with sun showing through her fine hair and through her dress, and the dust that rose as she walked and stuck with the sheen of sweat on her bare calves. He would not allow himself to remember any more than that. Before he remembered any more than that he would scrape through the basket of cassette tapes or turn on the radio and listen to the news, or the weather, even the talkback he hated, until the memory was blurred with the same softness as the mountains and his own hands were made strange – familiar in shape and colour, but annulled of detail, of scars and history.

His eyes became worse. Alison started coming five or six times a week although he told her not to. There were things that had lost possession of him – time in particular, and appearance to some extent – and when Alison came she brought these things with her. But she also brought the audio books, so he let her fuss with the washing and the meals and on and on about his smoking and his appetite. Alison's mother had never fussed so much. She hadn't minded him smoking. But he had his sight then. Perhaps if she'd have lived long enough to see him going blind, things might have been different. He let Alison go on fussing.

*

It was during a spring of heavy rainfall and power failures. Alison had called on him during a blackout, and after persuading her to go home for the evening he had lit the candles out of habit and used the batteries from the smoke alarm to power the radio. The batteries died and he sat awake all night in the quiet dark, the sound of the storm and of the house groaning around him every so often, as if in troubled sleep. As if it might stir from that sleep, murmur something to itself and roll over, him inside it.

When the tree came down he heard it. Heard it in such precise detail that, although his own hands were now strange to him and he could not read the face of the watch he still wore, he saw the startled birds erupting from the tilting canopy as one screeching white flurry against the grey pre-dawn sky. He saw the earth wrenched from the side of the mountain, the clumps of clay and rock held in the tangled mass of the root system, and the small insects that moved through the exposed clay.

Then when the morning came he saw the blur of the soft grey mountains. And he knew that their softness was not real, but could no longer remember them otherwise.