The Wrestlers
We used to wrestle in the white hallway. The long narrow hallway. You and I–big brother, little sister–wrestling silently night after night in that hallway. You were nineteen. I was only ten but I was strong. Sometimes our father would stand in the doorway to his bedroom, his arms crossed like a man posing in line for a sports team photo. Sometimes he would say, ‘You’d better be careful, boy. She’s getting stronger than you.’ Then he would fold back into his bedroom, dressing gown rustling like an old document, tassels of the cord swishing against his thighs.
We never made a sound except quick, hissing intakes of breath. I would wait after dinner, holding off until you walked down the hallway to the lounge room. My hand would reach out from inside the shadow of the doorway and grab your wrist, then I would throw myself against you and force you to the floor. When we hit the ground the walls trembled.
There were unspoken rules. No teeth, no hair-pulling, no nails. Only the grip on each other’s arms, the tightly closed mouths, knees in the back, in the chest. Twisting, wrenching, straining until one of us claimed victory after the other was pinned against the floor.
Our sisters and mother edged past the struggle on their way through the house, holding their cups of tea over their heads. We smashed the stained-glass panel in the door. We apologised to our mother. ‘Well stop it,’ she said. ‘Wait till your father sees.’
We cracked the plaster on the walls and wore the paint off the skirting board. We tore each other’s clothes and bruised each other’s flesh. I was only ten but I was strong. My hair had grown down past my waist and when we fought, the strands fell over my face obscuring my expression. But you knew without having to read my face. These are some of the things only you and I know. I had to have power over you.
There are many things only you and I know. Only we were there. Only we felt those things, only we lived them. Those are the parts of me I thought you could never shed. Those are the parts of me that I thought made you whole, that encased you in a second skin.
You taught me so much. That’s what big brothers are for. You taught me the world after midnight. Piles of toasted cheese sandwiches, coffee, late-night movies, the crackle of a joint smoked in the dark. I was sixteen years old. I knew everything. I knew that you and I agreed, but that was only coincidence. We agreed, I thought, because we were the same kind of people. Bitter people, bruised.
When I was an adolescent, you taught me the rules by which you lived your life. Of course you never spoke these maxims aloud, but I watched, and I learnt. I learnt about stillness. Playing dead. I can’t count the number of years you survived by playing dead. No one even guessed you were alive–they left you to decay into the furniture. But I knew. You were only practising stillness, the art of disappearing by stillness.
I’ve been trying all these years to think about what we were, that unit of misery, of self-destruction. But I know thinking is futile. Remember? I told you this. Thought travels across synapses faster than the speed of light, and at the speed of light there is no time. I learned about speed from a book on Einstein and I applied it to the real world, then I passed the discovery onto you when I was grown up enough to discover things you didn’t already know. I told you that thinking gets you nowhere because when you have finished thinking, faster than the speed of light, no time has passed in the real world. Nothing has changed. You can think all you like, but nothing will change.
‘I know,’ you answered.
‘No you didn’t know that,’ I cried. ‘I worked that out, I made it up. You couldn’t have known.’
‘All right, I didn’t know,’ you said.
We played a game when I was nine and you were eighteen. After everyone had gone to sleep we went out to the woodshed. One of us would stand against the wall of the shed, the other would hold a tennis ball. The one with the tennis ball was blindfolded and had to throw the ball as hard as possible against the wall. The one against the wall had to dodge. The wall was only four foot wide, the thrower was only four feet away. I was strong. When it was my turn to throw I peered under the blindfold. We pounded each other with the tennis ball for an hour at a time. We laughed each time it connected. When you were out in the daytime I practised and after a while I could hit you every time. But you weren’t really trying. Now I know that it was part of the stillness, that stillness involves not trying, involves waiting to be hurt.
Remember the way we used to sit in the lounge room? You in the armchair, me on the couch. We watched the screen and let it reflect our words across to each other. We spoke through the medium of the television as though it would mediate between us, prevent anything from flaring up, control any temptations to speak the truth. Your voice was deep and quiet, like the announcer saying goodnight on the ABC. I squealed the commercial television voice–always trying to capture attention, to enthuse, to draw the audience into believing what even I didn’t believe.
‘Look,’ I’d say, ‘there’s an old Jimmy Cagney movie on at four in the morning!’
‘I hate Jimmy Cagney,’ you said.
‘Yeah, so do I, but it might be funny, mightn’t it, you never know, do you?’ I whined.
‘I hate Jimmy Cagney,’ you said.
Our television days. And nights. And mornings. I know the theme songs for the television shows of a generation before mine–we watched the reruns at 3:00 am, we watched the specials on old stars at midnight.
‘Where is Davy Jones today?’ the announcer would ask. ‘What’s he doing? Does he wish he was still thrilling audiences around the world?’
You and I, brother, were the first vidiots. The voidoids. We sat in the lounge room, still, and our skins hardened a little each night under the blue rays.
A long time later now. I see you in the photos you send to other people. You smile at your wife and tickle your new baby. You stroll through the park on sunny days with the pram, and turn as your wife calls, ‘Look at the camera!’ You gaze into the lens of the camera like a stranger. The distant, pleasant smile of someone who has unburdened himself.
Your old friend Isobel hands me a photo you sent her. The photograph lies in my palm and I stare at your smiling face.
Once we used to give each other gifts. Doodles and notes, like children at school. Souvenirs from every place you or I had visited. Soon we had collected china cows, plastic money boxes, engraved spoons, bits of polished stone, kitsch postcards that we never sent to anyone, cups with stupid messages written on the outside. Souvenirs that signified everything, that meant nothing. Now you send photographs to everyone
but me.
Remember the last time you spoke to me? I had already smashed up my life and I was starting on yours. You were so generous I cleaned you out fast. All that was left was small change. You walked into the room as I prised the rubber stopper from the pineapple money box where you kept gold coins. One of the coins rolled under the couch and I grovelled on the carpet with my face jammed against the skirting board trying to
reach it.
‘That’s enough,’ you said. ‘Don’t steal my last dollar.’
I understand how wrong I was. I regret those times. I gave up that life. What else can I do? Have you shed our past so well there is no trace of me left in you?
I examine the photographs and I try to find messages in your expression, or in the pattern of toys and household goods in the background. I almost expect to see a shadow in the picture, a shell, like the carapace shed by a cicada on a paling fence. But each picture is in perfect focus–a tightly framed shot of your life without me.
The Last Visit
My sister Georgie tells me she’s coming to visit. I haven’t heard from her in three years. My first thought is, What does she want? My second thought is, She can’t have it.
The café tables are packed so tight the waiter has to rise on his toes to pass between the customers. He eases his buttocks past my head and delivers plates heaped with egg and bacon to three men at the table beside us. They raise forkfuls to their mouths as they eye off Georgie. She’s always had this effect. She is a double D cup. I stare at the men and they look quickly back at their plates. Everyone sees me and knows. Everyone except my sister.
‘Anyway, Georgie, have to head off,’ I say. ‘Heard a friend of mine’s sick, so I’m going to visit her.’
‘Do you want me to come? When will I see you?’ she asks and I put her off by saying we’ll go to the movies together before she leaves. I’m still thinking, What does she want?
I drop my sister at her friend’s house where she’s staying and go back to work. Joe’s waiting for me on the corner.
‘What the fuck are you wearing?’ he asks.
‘I’m about to change,’ I say, and I strip off my cardigan and duck behind the fence to change my skirt and stockings. The strip of mouldy concrete between the fence and the flats reeks of piss and vomit and I hop around trying to make sure my bare feet never touch the ground.
‘Did you hear Cherie’s sick?’ I ask Joe when I come out with my pretend clothes stuffed into my shoulder bag.
‘Cherie’s on the way out,’ he says.
‘What do you mean “on the way out”?’ I say, but Joe shrugs and heads off down the road.
For the rest of the day I keep thinking about what he said and I sit and smoke cigarettes on my corner and chat a bit to the girls hanging around on the corner opposite and take a couple of jobs, just quickies to the beach carpark and back. Every now and then I shiver.
That night, I go round to Cherie’s flat. No one answers my knock but the door swings open when I push it. The place stinks. Two cats sit on the kitchen table lashing their tails and further inside, in the bedroom, I can hear Cherie moaning.
She’s coming off, I can tell right away. She’s yellowish and sweating and mumbling and when I say, ‘Hey Cherie, it’s Amanda, I came to see if you needed anything,’ she looks straight at me but she doesn’t seem to know who I am.
‘Everyone sends their love,’ I tell her, even though she probably can’t hear me. I back out of the room, which also smells pretty bad because Cherie hasn’t moved off that bed in days.
I take a look around the flat before I leave. When I open the fridge the cats jump off the table. They twist around my legs until I pull out a crusty piece of pizza and drop it on the floor. I never knew cats ate pizza. In the lounge room is an ancient record player and four records, and a bunch of CDs but no CD player. I take a couple of the CDs since they obviously can’t use them.
As I pull the door shut behind me Cherie’s flatmate appears at the top of the stairs.
‘Is Cherie trying to get clean?’ I ask her.
‘No one knows,’ Maree says.
The last time I saw Maree she was wearing a brand new shirt that I offered to buy off her, a paisley shirt with big purple buttons. But she must have sold it to someone else because I didn’t see it in the flat and now she’s back to wearing the same old slutty tube top and hot pants with her fat thighs hanging out and her boobs sagging down to her knees. I can’t believe half the girls who get tricks down Grey Street. Are the johns blind?
‘But at least she’s stopped screaming,’ Maree says. ‘I think she’s over the bad bit.’ She puts her key in the lock and realises the door is open.
‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘Did fucking Cherie leave this door open again? I’ll fucking kill her. I’ve got valuables in there.’
‘Well, I’ll see you later,’ I say. I take the stairs two at a time on my way down.
I don’t like to leave Cherie there like that, with no one knowing what she wants, but what can I do? On the way up Jackson Street I run into Joe.
‘See, I told you. She’s on the way out,’ he says. Joe always knows where I’ve been, even when I’m too out of it to know myself.
‘You’re giving me the creeps. Do something.’
‘What am I supposed to do?’
‘Where’s her bloke?’
‘I told you, she’s on the way out. He knows that. No point throwing good money after a dead loss.’
I rest my hand on the arm of Joe’s leather jacket. The leather is cracked and dry. ‘Is that what you’re going to do to me? Tell everyone I’m on the way out and leave me to lie in my own shit?’
Joe brushes my hand away. He pulls a smoke out of his breast pocket. A score falls on the ground and he bends over and picks up the silver packet, saying ‘Whoops,’ and laughing.
‘Of course I won’t,’ he says, lifting the lighter into his cupped hand and lighting the smoke. ‘It’ll be the best care for you, baby.’
‘Baby? You’ve been watching too much TV.’
At home Kareen’s eating fish and chips out of a box and watching The Simpsons.
‘Seen your sister?’ she says.
‘Went to see Cherie.’
‘Oh yeah? How is she?’
‘They say she’s on her way out.’
‘Shit,’ she says, and lifts the box toward me. ‘Want a potato cake?’
We watch The Simpsons and the news on a couple of stations and Sale of the New Century. I know all the answers except three hard ones.
‘You should go on that,’ Kareen says. She keeps wandering in and out of the bedroom and the lounge room as she dresses for work. She drifts through wearing a bra and no panties, then a bra and panties and a pair of shoes, then a pair of shoes and panties and no bra.
‘Are you going to put something else on top of that, or are you in the mood to get booked?’ I say to her.
‘Can I wear your leather jacket?’ she asks.
‘No.’
‘Well, what about that green skirt–the short one?’
‘No.’
She goes back into the bedroom and comes out wearing her jeans and a tight jumper. Kareen is only sixteen and very pretty with a soft red mouth. She could have been a model.
‘That looks all right,’ I say, tucking the label of her jumper in. ‘Why did you want to get dressed up anyway?’
‘Oh, you know. I dunno.’
She’s blushing. I heard she’s got a crush on a john, some older guy who cruises on Friday nights. He’s picked her up three weeks in a row. He drives a sporty Lexus and gives her an extra tip each time. I’ve seen her hiding the money in her tampon box, as if she thinks that will be safe from Joe.
Joe’s only known her a few weeks. He asked me to let her stay in my flat while she got on her feet.
‘She’s been abused,’ he said. ‘She needs a bit of kindness. I know you’ll be good to her.’
‘So name me one of the girls who hasn’t been abused. Big deal. You get her a flat. I don’t want to share, I’ve told you that a million times.’
Like I had a choice. She moved in the next day and I got a punch in the kidneys for my attitude. ‘You’re smart, Mandy, and you’re not out of control like some girls, but you’re gonna be a victim of your own attitude one day.’ That’s what he always says to me when he’s angry.
They used to tell me the same thing at school. ‘Young lady, mind your attitude. Why can’t you be more like your sister?’
Because I’m someone else, I wanted to answer. Because things happen differently for me. And because you have no idea who we are.
Next day at the needle-exchange van Maree stands in front of me in the queue.
‘How’s Cherie?’ I ask.
‘Gone,’ Maree answers through a mouthful of dim sim.
My heart lurches. Well, I think it’s my heart but it might be my liver or my stomach or my bowels. Anyway, something inside does a kind of hip hop because I think she means Cherie is dead.
‘When? How?’ I’m standing quite still, holding my needles. Someone shoves me in the back and tells me to get a move on.
‘Last night. She went quiet and I thought I’d better look at her and she was real pale, Casper, you know, and twitching? So I called the ambulance and they took her to the Alfred.’
‘And what did they say?’
‘I dunno. I had to get my videos back before twelve. I get home and I think, great, I can have my bed back now, I’m so sick of sleeping on that fucking couch, but the bed’s gross. She shat in it!’
‘Well she was sick, Maree. Get it? Sick? No one to look after her?’
Maree slumps off, stuffing another dim sim in her mouth. I pocket my syringes and walk around the corner to where Joe’s waiting.
‘I’m going to get off this stuff,’ I say as he hands me a deal.
‘Go for it,’ he says.
‘I mean it.’
‘Yeah well, I hear it’s been done, but I sure don’t know any of them. Unless you count the ones in the morgue.’
‘Very funny,’ I say, and I set off up the hill in Grey Street toward my corner on Burnett Street. There’s a lunchtime rush.
‘What’s your secret?’ a girl calls out from across the road. ‘I’m getting nothing.’
‘My charm and sophistication,’ I call back.
Joe’s not due back till three. I figure I’ve made enough money to take a short break.
The cool green park rolls by outside the tram window. Joggers sweat it out around the track and a couple of teenagers are pashing on the grass. I lean my head against the warm glass and relax until I remember I’m going to the movies with my sister tonight. She wants to have a drink afterwards and talk. After all these years she wants to talk. I know she’s a good person. Everyone likes Georgie. But it’s too late for talking.
I was happy this morning when I realised Cherie wasn’t dead. Now that’s gone pop and the good mood has shot out of me like air out of a balloon. I can’t believe I’m going to visit her in the hospital. She ripped me off on a deal once and I was sick for days thanks to whatever she’d cut it with. On the street these things happen all the time but you always hope the other girls won’t do you over. They do. You have to let it go.
Last summer Cherie and I caught the train to Sovereign Hill theme park. We panned for gold. In the first handful of gravel she found a speck of gold and got all fired up.
‘It’s a sign. My luck’s changing. I’m going to get clean and get out of this crap life.’
‘A sign? A sign from the management,’ I said. ‘They put gold in the creek every day.’
‘You didn’t get any,’ she pointed out.
The first thing we did when we got back to town was score. But maybe she is finally getting clean.
At the hospital reception desk I realise how stupid I really am. I don’t know Cherie’s second name. I don’t even know if Cherie is her real name. Amanda isn’t mine. The woman behind the desk keeps putting her hands out in front of her like a mime, making a wall between her and me and saying ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you, but without that information...I’m sorry.’
By the time I’ve finished making a fool of myself there I’ve been gone for an hour already, so I hail a taxi. I offer the driver a couple of CDs as payment and he leaves the meter off and drives me back. As we pull up at Burnett Street I see Joe sitting on the fence, smoking a cigarette and chatting up the girls on the other corner. He smiles as I cross the road and I know I’m in trouble.
‘Been having a lunch break?’ he asks.
‘Look, I just wanted to see Cherie—’
‘What do you think this is? An office job?’
‘I didn’t...’ I can feel myself coming right down. My body is starting to ache, hungry for a fix.
‘Well?’ Joe says.
‘Joe, please. I just went to see Cherie, that’s all. I was only gone half an hour.’
‘But you didn’t get to see her, did you,’ he says.
I’m not surprised he knows. He knows everything about me. I sit down beside him and pull a cigarette from my bag. Joe lights it for me with his Zippo, the oily smoke curling up my nostril. At least he’s not going to make me pay for leaving my corner.
‘I am sorry about Cherie, all right?’ he says. ‘But life goes on. Anyway, what did I tell you about the ones who get clean being in the morgue? Was I right or was I right?’
Early that night after I get home and fixed up, Kareen runs in the door crying and trying to hide a bruise on her left cheek. I pull her hand away. The bruise is red, but tomorrow it will be purple and round and swollen, like passionfruit.
‘Was it Joe?’ I ask.
She shakes her head.
‘Who was it?’ I say. Kareen doesn’t answer. ‘Who was it?’ I shout.
‘Joe,’ she sobs. ‘It was Joe. He heard about my extra tips.’
Kareen goes for a shower and comes out of the bathroom in her pyjamas and with her hair in a towel. Warm soapy steam follows her into the lounge room. She flops on the couch and pulls on her slippers, great fluffy things with bunny faces on the toes.
‘I don’t want you in this flat anymore,’ I tell Kareen. ‘Go and get a job. Get a life. Get out.’
Spit bubbles to the corners of her pretty red lips as she blubbers.
‘Please, Mandy. I’ll clean up the flat. I won’t...’