Tarcutta Wake (6 page)

Repairs

She took the ‘S' arm off her typewriter so that she wouldn't be able to spell his name. It would help, she thought. If only in a small, stupid way. But she couldn't spell her own name, without the ‘S', and this was problematic. Her name, and a lot of other names, a lot of other words.

Bezt. Regardz. Cheerz. Xincerely. Thanx.

The typewriter repairman came to work each day in a suit which had once fit him well. He sat amongst the boxes of new ribbons and the cans of compressed air, the refurbished Underwoods and Olivettis, and he waited. He knew a lot of things that didn't matter anymore, such as how to repair a broken carriage pull, how to realign typebars and how to reattach those that had been torn off in fits of anger or fits of despair. When she came in with her S-less Corona, he pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose.

Love, then? he asked, as she lowered the old machine onto his workbench.

Probably, she said. Probably love. Sorry to make you do this again.

House

When I write of a house now, it is only ever the one house: its smell of smoke and old wood, foxed books, dried bluegum torn lazily from the overgrown yard. Perhaps you haven't realised this yet. Because in one story, I've sat you at the monstrous kitchen table, its surface a forest of knives, their tips driven into the southern mahogany. The empty knife block hidden amongst them like the woodcutter's empty cottage. And in another story, we are crouched behind the ruined shed, amongst the blood and the feathers, and from here the kitchen cannot be seen. Stand in the birdless aviary (you know where we are now, don't you?) and you won't see me lying on the slate floor, won't feel my hands either side of your face. You won't hear me saying there isn't a single thing I feel sorry about. It's only ever the one house, but it's shifting, unmappable, and I can never get far enough away to see the whole of it.

Into the arms of the parade

I went into her apartment and there was nothing on the walls. Just one bright room with ruined floorboards, and no furniture in the room except an easel, a bookshelf stacked with ragged paperbacks and a four-panel folding screen with a mattress behind it. The screen was exquisite and didn't belong in the room; its wooden panels slid into the framework and were carved to look like the boughs of a willow tree. The mattress didn't make it any easier to imagine someone living in that space. Waking up there, under the pile of blankets. Eating while standing, like a horse, looking out of the one narrow window. She was twice my age, at least – too old to live like that. I laced my fingers through the leaves of the wooden screen while she set up the easel and scraped at a stick of charcoal.

She said to sit anywhere, but there was nowhere to sit. I undressed and leaned against the window sill, my back turned on the view of inner suburban rooftops and the bare branches of the plane trees. On a neighbouring roof a small forest had taken root in the build-up of dead leaves and bird shit. The owners of the house probably didn't even know it was up there, but sparrows were darting in and out and making their homes amongst the spindly growth. Yes, beautiful things still happened by accident. It could happen just like that. I had my head in that incidental forest, small birds scratching at the sides of my thoughts, but my eyes were fixed on the second row of the bookshelf, where a postcard showing a Mexican parade was propped against the cracked spines of Pessoa and le Carre. I thought that if I could only flip it over and read what was written on the back, I might be able to know something about her. Perhaps a greater knowing than she could have of me, seeing only my pale breasts and the burn scar on my thigh, the silver tendrils creeping out across my stomach, marking where the skin had stretched, uselessly.

It's not how you'd think, never sexual. It's more like being topography, or furniture, or both – like being a landscape carved into a folding screen. I've learned to measure time through pain and paraesthesia, in how a raised arm will fall asleep right up to the shoulder in less than ten minutes, depending on blood pressure. For me it's six minutes.

The fingers of my left hand were already tingling and I was looking at the Mexican postcard, thinking about something stupid I'd said to somebody the night before. I turned the conversation over and over behind the blank expression I was holding, sure that she could see the whole exchange playing out behind my eyes. When I was still for long periods of time it always happened this way. Like televised violence I couldn't turn my head from. Old failures and humiliations broke loose from their moorings and bobbed to the surface, as if up from dark water. If I stood up and moved around I could shake them for a while, but they'd be waiting when I settled back into position, as though it were not a chair or a chaise longue or a window sill I was returning to, but a great hall where all of my mistakes lined the walls, waiting for their turn to grab my wrist. I looked at the dancing women of the Mexican postcard, their plump arms extending from the ruffled sleeves of Adelita dresses. Reaching skyward, as if to catch something considered unanimously precious.

After twenty minutes I stretched and rolled my ankles, listening to the bones crack. I opened and closed my left hand, waiting for the blood to come back to it. Then I walked around behind her canvas to see whether I looked anything like myself. In twenty minutes, she'd only sketched as far as my left clavicle, part of my shoulder and a procession of tiny boats wrecked beneath my suprasternal notch. The boats were all empty, skeletal. Their sterns and skegs rotted, and the oars torn away. I felt uneasy then, as though she'd slipped a palette knife under my collarbone and prised it up like it was an old floorboard to see what was underneath.

Do you still need me to stand here if you're only drawing boats? I asked.

She didn't answer, and I stood beside her a moment longer before returning to my place by the window, setting the timer for another twenty minutes and biting the inside of my cheek to keep myself there, in her stark apartment, or in the fleshy arms of Central Mexico. Anywhere but that crowded hall. I thought of Eva Frederick, her hands folded forever across her soft belly in museum storage rooms, and no one knowing a single thing about her that wasn't right there, in either of the two portraits Kahlo had made out of her.

My name's not even Elena, I said without turning my head. That's not even Elena's shoulder you're drawing.

The artist finally looked out from behind her easel. Whose is it then?

It's somebody else's. That's my point. You don't even know whose shoulder you're drawing, so why do you need me here to continue on with your boats?

What difference does it make? She asked this gently, reassuring. What difference could it possibly make?

I leaned back imperceptibly, so that my shoulder blades touched the cool glass of the window. I was still looking at the postcard, and although I couldn't read what was written on the back of it I felt I could see into all the corners of her life. Past the battered paperbacks and the beautiful folding screen. Through the willow boughs to the mattress under its heaped blankets, straight through to the tangled sadness of sleep. Behind me the windowpane had warmed with the heat of my body, until it seemed as though the glass might melt and I could at last fall back, numb, into the arms of the parade.

Souvenirs

Unspookable

When you come back you won't know me. I swear to god I don't even stand the way I used to. Nothing to send a ripple out across my flesh like I was a startled horse about to bolt, not anymore. You only got so much nerves, my father said once, and when they're worn through they're worn through. And I know what he meant – that you're supposed to go to pieces then, when all your nerve is gone, but it didn't happen that way for me. My nerves got worn through and then I didn't have to worry about them again. The wind kicks dust in my face and I don't even blink, you understand. I'm unflinching now. Unspookable.

I kept souvenirs from the time before, things to know my old self by in case it ever came limping back. Pieces of the kids' clothes. Blueprints of the house and the registration papers for the car, as though the past were a place I could return to if I was holding the right documents. The wedding ring they had to cut away in the emergency ward.

My hands got burned up pretty bad. My hands and my arms. It was too late anyway and it didn't prove a thing but it felt right at the time. I couldn't just not do anything. And I know people are looking at me now, different from how they once did, cause I look like someone who's got a story. But it's not a story anyone would want to know. Not like I know it, word for word and breath for breath. The exact weight and shape of it so that even my hands remember. My hands have a memory all of their own and they keep raising up as though to stop the things they couldn't stop.

But you can hold them if you want to. They don't hurt anymore.

A kind of ritual

She'd already started going to pieces the year the Southern Star melted, its twelve hundred tonnes of steel buckling in the January heatwave. The attraction was dismantled and hauled off somewhere, leaving only the support towers and lateral bracing.

It was as though the wheel had simply rolled away one night, slipping quietly past the ice-skating rink and the direct factory outlets. Into the Yarra River, churning up the mud under the West Gate Bridge and travelling on out into Port Phillip Bay, before finally settling on its side with its tail in its mouth; an exhausted, ouroboric beast.

He remembers thinking about it afterwards, and the peace it had brought him then. The idea of something so large disappearing so quickly, that the world was bigger than his own mistakes. That the world would forget them. But the remnants of the structure looming over the docklands are a hulking monument to failures inseparable from his own. A reminder of the warning signs he missed and the things he can't bring back.

Each time he drives across the Bolte Bridge he feels something like a fist closing inside his chest. Twice a day, five days of the week. He will sometimes lift his hand from the steering wheel as he passes. Salute the life he once had, repeat the names of his children like a broken mantra. It's become a kind of ritual. Moving forward without leaving.

Yes they remember

Yes they remember the dogs the smell of their paws and their sighs that meant nothing the sound of them clattering through the house and round the yard all the things they helped to bury things no one will ever find now the bird bones the broken cups their grandfather's watch with its tick slowed to the sound of a heart Yes they remember the yard lying face-down on it its earth and its secrets the dryness of their final summer smell of sunscreen rotting magnolia insecticide the dead-grass smell of circuses of animal pavilions Yes they remember the summer the scratch of split vinyl back seat on salt dry cheeks and the weight of the coats they slept under sand pouring from the pockets on the way back from the ocean Yes they remember the ocean being thrown from strong shoulders and scrambling up to be thrown again the world tilting and the water meeting them a dozen different ways they have these pictures now of days stuck like they were cut from magazines and cannot tell whose was whose the lion in the glass box rope swing by a yellow river cicada shells clinging to rough tree bark and their names etched into the damp wood of the jetty but whose was whose? whose lip split on the handlebars whose arm torn by the loose nail Yes they remember the taste of blood the spit the stitches their mother fainting but all of this is fainting all of it fragile now like the bird they found one morning with its heart slowed to a dull knock to the tick of an earthbound clock and they can cup it all in their hands all of it (the bird the ocean the summer the dogs) and breathe their warm breath on it try to keep it alive a while longer but they can't take it with them they can't take any of it with them and out in the yard there are the things that they buried all the things they would one day come back for.

Scar from a trick with a knife

We were embarrassed by your kindness. You insisted we take the bed, saying the floor would do you fine, and in the spare room of your small apartment you lay on an inflatable camping mattress, surrounded by our equipment and luggage. Maybe you liked that – the forest of tripods; soft mountains of clothing and towels spilling from our suitcases; forty-two inch reflector rising like a full moon behind it all. Maybe it felt like being part of something important. Or maybe we were flattering ourselves, thinking that. We had money from a town you'd never been to, for a project we had difficulty explaining.

So you are here to make photographs of hands?

Yes.

Hands only?

Mostly hands, yes.

And this is for helping people in your country to understand … ?

About collective residual guilt.

Collective. Residual. Guilt. Old people's hands or younger people's hands?

Anyone's hands. It doesn't matter.

My hands also?

Sure, you have great hands.

And they would help people to understand?

Definitely.

But I do not feel guilty.

But of course we didn't believe you, because there was still the inexplicable kindness. You weren't even religious. We needed to find reasons for it. Like you'd done something horrendous earlier in your life that you were working to make amends for. We would have been satisfied with that.

It was something we noticed immediately, shaking hands with you on the platform of Schönleinstraße. Just as if it were a speech impediment or disproportionate features. But you looked and sounded normal; fine blonde hair thinning at your temples, pale skin, bad posture from the desk job you hated to talk about. Brief smile, like headlights from a slow-moving car sweeping over a lounge-room wall at night time. And the same grey-blue eyes as the cousin who had given us your email address. It wasn't a physical thing, but it was just as obvious. A person could have made it out from across the street, or by glimpsing your face in the window of a passing train. We called it loneliness because we couldn't think of a better word for it at the time, though retrospectively we called it
apartness
– something that had possibly developed out of loneliness, but more likely the other way around – and we didn't notice we'd both noticed this until some time later, talking quietly together in your bed. Our heads on your pillows, discussing it; your apartness. How you must have hoped to compensate for it with your kindness, and how the kindness only drew attention to it. Yes, it felt wrong. Disrespectful and a little ungrateful, talking about you like that in your own bed while you lay in the next room amongst the chaos of our possessions.

You told us you were better than you used to be. Though when you heard groups of people laughing in public places, you still believed it to be at your expense. Some things could not be helped, you said. Little things. But you were getting better. You told us this as we drank around your small table, late one hot night when nobody could sleep and wasps were dying all over your kitchen. There are progressive stills of your window sill, little yellow bodies lined up, gathering summer dust. We didn't know what was killing them but we weren't sorry to see them dead. We checked each empty glass before drinking from it, because they had a tendency to die in glassware. When we found one it would join the others on the sill. By the time we left the tally was in the low thirties.

That city was like a theatre set, or a lucid dream. We turned its corners too fast and there would be parts missing, as though we hadn't imagined it properly. Watch out for the drug dealers in Hasenheide Park, you told us, but all we saw was a woman walking like she was about to hit something, her body tensed up in a rage so complete it was almost majestic.

We spent so long in that place we began to speak in broken English. It's possible we did this unintentionally, in order to be more clearly understood by those who spoke it as a second language. One milk please, one bread. You began correcting us, saying that was not how English would break here, if it were to be broken. So we settled for speaking as formally as you did, with fewer contractions, no slang or colloquialisms. We drank in bars that ran out of the backs of bombed-out buildings or in bars where the furniture had been bolted to the ceiling upside-down, and dutifully we collected our hand portraits, favouring chipped fingernails, nicotine stains, scars, tattoos and varicose veins. There was a scar about an inch and a half long on the back of your left hand that we wouldn't leave alone.

I told you already. There was a trick with a knife I used to be able to do.

Yes, but can you show us this trick?

I am no longer able to do it properly. The scar is from the time after the last time the trick was done properly.

Was it the one where you stab the spaces between your fingers, getting faster and faster?

No, it was a different trick.

Sometimes you would come with us as an interpreter, approaching people in restaurants and at train stations. You explained our project while people looked past you suspiciously to where we stood with our old Leicas hanging from our necks. We didn't know the words for ‘collective' and ‘residual', but we knew that the word for guilt was
Schuld
and we never heard you use it in any of your explanations, so we knew you weren't saying the things we had told you to say. But almost everyone you spoke to would eventually shrug and nod, and you'd bring them over to us with that slow-moving smile, so we didn't care all that much about what you'd told them.

We kept a little notebook with entries for each pair of hands we photographed, listing names, ages and distinguishing characteristics so that we could match them up with corresponding photographs when the film was developed:

Lana. Fem. 23. Picture of Kafka's face tattooed inside right wrist.

Christoph. Male. 53. Tip of left index finger lost in factory accident.

Eva. Fem. Early 40s (?). Bright red fingernails filed to points. Plain gold wedding ring.

Sometimes we forgot the notebook, and other notes were written on small slips of paper and on the backs of receipts which were eventually lost between there and here.

After our film canisters have been cleared from your refrigerator, after your bed is your own bed again, we sit on a lounge-room floor on the other side of the world and hold negative strips up to the light. We can't remember the name of the kid with the bruised knuckles; the hairdresser whose fingers were stained purple with dye; which cafe we were in when we met the waitress with a reminder scrawled across the back of her left hand in blue pen,
Tiny Vipers – Schokoladen – Donnerstag.

When we develop the photographs, moving around each other in the chemical dark of a room that was once a second bathroom, your scar from the trick with a knife is not among them. Just the mention of it in the diary,
Fynn. 37. Scar from a trick with a knife on back of left hand.
And a photograph of you standing by the Rosa Luxemburg memorial on the Landwehrkanal. Another and another of your kitchen window sill lined with the hateful dead insects. There's you wiping your hair out of your eyes, the desperate kindness creasing them at the corners, making us wary, and we have left all your letters unanswered.

Even so, our missing lens cap arrives one morning, carefully swaddled in tissue and bubble-wrap and sent by registered post. The wasps are still dying, you write. There are now fifty-seven.