by Simon Cleary
Luck’s got nothing to do with this, he thinks.
I can’t wait, he types in the light of the pulsing screen, his fingers trembling. There’s a café at Picnic Point. Let’s meet there, tomorrow, Saturday. Can you make midday?
His blood pulses with her as she returns to him, once again swimming back to him from the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, her skin glistening, his body aching.
Kira pulls out of the motel at dawn the next day, elated in a way she couldn’t explain. Behind her Blake has disappeared into My Neighbour Totoro playing on the DVD player she’s hooked over the back of the passenger seat. She winds down the window to hear the morning roar. She reaches out. The cool air buffets her hand. She allows it to pass through her fingers. How smooth, how easy. And yet now, finally, she has something solid to reach for, a tomorrow from which she might pull herself to safety. She feels herself surge with something she’s hasn’t felt for a long time. A tremor of life, hope.
Almost a miracle that the world is offering her this once again. Phelan.
Azure or Cobalt?
By dawn, lying on his night-tossed mattress, Phelan is swinging wildly. Penny moves around her bedroom, preparing for work, unknowing. Phelan unlocks his room and steps out into the morning hallway, desperate to recognise something of himself. Through the square of frosted glass in the door at the end of the corridor a tribune of daylight is glowing. He blinks.
‘Good morning,’ Penny says from behind him, startling him.
‘Morning,’ he mumbles. He can’t turn around to face her, the swell of guilt too great. He hears her standing there in the hall for a long, long time, waiting for him. When she gives up and returns to her bedroom and her make-up, closing the door on him, Phelan doubles over, sick in his gut.
He has to get out, opens the door and hurries from the verandah into the garden and through the gate, and across the paling summer grasses in the paddock out towards the escarpment, his dog trailing him, nudging him for a pat he can’t give. He sits, lights a smoke and looks out. An unseasonal mist has pooled in the valley below. The dog whimpers and Phelan slips his hand under its collar, feeling the rhythmic rise and fall of its chest but unable to fall in with it. A second cigarette, a third, half a pack, just one more.
He waits until Penny is gone. There’s a note on the kitchen table. She’ll be back at four. Text her if he wants her to pick anything up on the way home, a kiss and a hug, xo. A drink, he thinks bitterly, I could do with a fucking bottle of whiskey.
Once upon a time, a lifetime ago, he’d been constant. Once upon a time he’d known what to do, knew what he wanted. He’d thought that steady man was returning. He’d thought that man was back, or nearly so. During all his ruminations about Beckett, through the years of his fixations and his painstaking regathering of fragments of himself, she’d been invisible. He’d somehow severed her, disappeared that night from his memory, erased it from what had remained of his life and what he and Penny had been rebuilding. But now! Now she comes rushing back, a torrent, throwing him off course again, sweeping him away, taunting him, and it is Beckett who remains, burning at his shoulder. Beckett, mocking him. My cock, my nuts.
‘Fuck,’ Phelan screams at the ceiling. Fuuuuuck. He scratches at his shoulder with his fingernails, great agitated gouges. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. They cleared the beer out of the fridge years ago. Still he goes and stands and stares. There’s an opened bottle of moselle that Penny’s begun drinking occasionally after her years of saintly fucking abstinence in support of him. He pours it down his throat, dizzy, gone, the taste of it. Fuck her that she’s got the Hilux with her in town, and that the quad bike is in getting serviced and that he’s trapped, and there’s no bottle shop, no pub, nothing in walking distance. The old anxiety overwhelms him as he stands in the small kitchen in the Big House, a fusillade of competing compulsions. He rushes out to the verandah, his wild eyes groping for the horizon.
He chains the dog to its kennel, and sets out in search of something to drink. The fleeing sound of his boots on the concrete path from the back door to the gate to the gravel road. He hurries past the three bunya pines on his right, oblivious to them. He is vaguely aware of the cottage on his left as he starts his determined march up the rise and then down the other side to the yards. After that he turns east and forces his body between two strands of barbed wire, catching and tearing his shirt. The barbs bite at his flesh as he pulls free and when he feels his burning skin it feels good. He continues his march on the other side, more slowly. He reaches the edge of the escarpment and skirts it south, pushing his ungainly way through the afternoon bush, scattering the birds and insects, the fallen bark bursting under the soles of his boots, all the bushcraft of which he’d once been so proud, gone.
He does not see the bandicoot hole for the long grass and steps into it, tripping, falling, twisting his ankle, cursing. He lies back, feeling the pain, feeling his ankle begin to swell. But he knows not to rest too long and rises, limps on.
At the boundary fence to the first of the mansions he stops. His ankle is throbbing, the cut on his back too. As he catches his breath, he looks for movement behind the windows of the house ahead, but the curtains are drawn, and there is no car in the carport either, no clothes on the line. He crawls awkwardly between the fence wires, taking more care this time, and hobbles across the exposed grass, increasing his pace now that he is in the open, alert to danger all around him.
Phelan reaches the cover of the house, presses his body against the wall and stops. He’s controlling his breathing now, gauging his environment, measuring the distance to the end of the wall. He feels uncomfortably light, almost naked. His chest is exposed, his head, and he’s already received a flesh wound on his back. There’s an old rake propped against the side of the house ahead of him, and he takes it, holding it crossways. It’s good to have something in his hands, some weight to balance him. He slowly circumnavigates the house, peering through the windows and the glass doors, stopping at intervals to put his ear to the wall, listening. Satisfying himself it’s empty, he finds the spare key on a hook under the tank stand.
Phelan opens the living room cabinets, one by one, till he finds the spirits shelf. He pushes the bottles of rum and gin aside until he finds the whiskeys, rummaging among them, glass clinking against glass. He unscrews the cap on a bottle of Jameson’s, snapping the seal, his fist tight around its thin neck. Then the sting in the back of his throat. His burning, blinking eyes. The smoke of burning abstinence. His nerves beginning to calm.
He finds a tumbler and drops into an armchair facing a pair of enormous sliding glass doors that frame the east. He can almost smell the light outside, the dryness of it in his throat. He slugs and gazes and there is the glass and what is beyond the glass, and he flicks between the two in search of some distracting optical effect, anything, but he is suddenly exhausted from the trek and closes his eyes.
There’s an explosion in the room, a great bang and a shuddering and Phelan throws himself to the ground and he is rolling for cover, his heart rushing, his head beating, some fuck somewhere, some fight, some flight, the suck of death. Fuck, fuck, fuck. It’s him that’s going to explode. The reverberations of the detonation are roiling around the room and he can hear through the echoes a scratching, and sees the glass is still intact, and the scratching is on the other side of the pane and he is sure Beckett is clawing towards him, but there’s no bloody hand yet reaching slowly up the glass. Still the scratching, louder, more insistent, and he uncurls himself, and is on his knees and it’s good that the glass hasn’t shattered and it’s good that it’s still just him in the room, and it’s good that while the room is reverberating there aren’t shells coming in too, one, two, three fucking hundred.
When eventually he stands, what he sees is a kingfisher stilled in the gloam beyond the glass, its body crumpled on the decking where it has fallen after flying into the door. Still Phelan’s heart thuds. He finds the latch and s
lides the glass doors. He kneels and picks the thing up and lays it in his great shaking palm, still warm. There’s a cross-breeze ruffling its feathers and he’s unsure whether it’s dead. Azure or cobalt? he wonders of its wings. There’s a tremor, and a heart, and its beak parts, its hardness on his skin too, and as he holds the creature in the cup of his trembling hand it levers itself up with a wing and grasps his hard forefinger with its iron claws and steadies itself. The whiskey is inside, but he waits here for long minutes as the bird rests on his hand, gathering strength before remembering something out there in the bush or in the air, and pushing against his hand, taking flight. Gone.
The hand that held the bird that holds the whiskey. He pours another glass, and then another, a setting sun’s worth, opens another bottle, and finally it is dark and his head is empty and his hands have stopped their trembling and he’s forgotten the bird and maybe he’s asleep.
Refugee
She drives through the long day, Armidale and Glen Innes and Tenterfield and Warwick, towns that looked more substantial on the map than they are passing through. Finally, Toowoomba, whatever that means, the first of the Aboriginal names this side of the border. Already she’s further north than she’s ever been before.
She has left almost everything, as refugees do. Her entire portfolio is back there, all the drawings and the paintings and the stencils she’s kept. Her history told in leaves of paper and cardboard. Kira imagines him tossing them out. Not for him the melodrama of tearing them up, or burning them, or tipping them out the window into the street. He’ll calmly carry them, load by load, down to the skip in the alley behind the apartment block till the bin’s full, and he’ll wait until the collectors lift it on their mechanical arms and the bin tilts and tips and her life of drawing is upended into the back of the council rubbish truck. She can almost hear the increased pitch in its engine as it accelerates away.
But she has the pictures in her head. She lies awake at night and tries to retrieve them. Stronger than her memories of the drawings are the bodies. She could track them down, she thinks, those arms and backs and thighs and hips. Those parts of herself on other people’s bodies moving in the world, showing her off. It amazes her, when she stops to think about it, that this very moment her tattoos are cleaning kitchens and writing judgements and driving buses and dealing cards and making love and publishing poems. What that map would look like.
She could go to her website, she thinks, and – if he hasn’t yet pulled it down – click through the images in her gallery. He could easily have shut the site down, eliminated that part of her too. It’s irrational, but she fears even checking, easy as it would be. The fear? That somehow, if she clicked onto the website, it’d lead him to her. Even crazier is the fear that she’d be sitting at a computer in some council library somewhere, and the moment she clicked on the webpage link, he’d appear on the screen, looking at her, watching, and that he’d then know where she was – seated before what monitor in what library in what street in what town – and come looking, track her down. That if she clicked on her own site, she’d give herself away.
So, she’s a refugee, seeking strength, protection, possibility. The one last man, that’s who she’s after. The one who might take them in, and who might have the power to protect them. The one upon whom she and Blake, surely, have as great a claim as anyone.
‘Who are you?’
Phelan is blinking, and shaking his head, and staggering to his feet in the blinding whiteness of the new world. But it’s just a man in a pale blue shirt and suit trousers, and Phelan groggily assesses it is no one to fear and drops back into the armchair, squinting against the fluorescent ceiling lights. The stranger still has his car keys in his outstretched right hand, frozen in the moment of placing them on the kitchen bench.
‘What are you doing in my house?’
Phelan’s head is spinning. He reaches for the tumbler, which is empty, and then the bottle and drains the last of the man’s Jameson’s. He stands and limps towards the man, his right hand outstretched.
‘Do I know you?’ the man asks.
‘Brigadier James Phelan,’ he says, drunk. ‘Poet. Husband. Arsehole.’
Then Phelan unsteadily points back across the ridges and through the bush in the direction of the Big House where Penny will be beside herself. He points to the vague north, as if that is where Brigadier James Phelan might be found.
‘Afghanistan?’ the man asks, thinking lame leg, thinking IED.
‘Yes,’ Phelan slurs, his swollen ankle just another thing to shame him.
When Penny collects him, he is weeping. She apologises to their neighbour, who waves her away.
‘It’s nothing,’ he says patiently.
She had thought these embarrassments were behind them.
Her husband sobs that he doesn’t deserve her. She gets him into the passenger seat and lays it back so he can curl up and cry as she drives him home. ‘I love you, Pen. I love you.’ Her eyes are on the road. She asks nothing. Outside the gate of the Big House she opens the car door and kneels on the grass and strokes his head till the angle of the risen moon strikes them both.
By the time he gets into the house he is emptied out, except for his pounding head. She gives him Panadol, and then Valium and settles him into bed, the radio on in the kitchen, the bedroom shades drawn, frames of rectangled moonlight around them.
What, she thinks, has triggered this? It’s not always obvious, not always anything significant, sometimes just three nightmares in a row. But there’s usually something. Perhaps he’s just deflated after the euphoria of the television interview and all the activity that followed, the messages of encouragement, the thanks for starting a ‘national conversation’ about what the war is doing to us. Tomorrow, she thinks, I’ll ask him tomorrow.
Though dark has fallen, Kira finds the caravan park on the southern edge of town. In the office the manager is watching the Saturday night league on a small television perched on the reception desk. He doesn’t look at her as she checks in, only breaking contact with the screen to count the cash she hands him as payment for a bed.
Phelan wakes in the night, panting. The images are still stampeding through him and over him, and his ears are ringing and the gore on his hands is sticky and won’t go away, and he’s wiping and wiping and wiping them against his pants, and when that’s no good he’s trying to shake his own bloodied hands off the end of his arms to get away from every little piece of Beckett that’s still clinging to him.
He spills a glass of water down his front as he tries to drink at the kitchen sink, and still the images of Beckett pulse before him. Phelan presses his fists into his eyes until his eyeballs hurt and he’s temporarily blinded.
Don’t come, he emails her.
All Her Protective Spells
It is raining lightly when Kira wakes. She looks at her son making origami cranes on the bunk of the onsite caravan, his little hands deftly folding sheets of bright yellow paper. She can’t afford to tire. Blake needs her to be vigilant, not just for the things she fears, but all the demons out there whose existence she can’t conceive of, let alone comprehend. Does she look at the boy too often and too much? This itself turns into an anxiety; that under her gaze the boy might atrophy, or become pressed out of the shape he was destined for.
Kira locks the caravan and steps across the gravel to the common room to check her emails. She hopes Phelan will be there, but fears Flores will. That he will have got over the shock of her leaving, and will now be working on a plan.
She logs on to a barrage of messages from Flores. His name fills her inbox, line after line. It’s as if she’s already doing her penance, as if it has already been written out there on the screen, again and again, a hundred times.
Kira’s hand shakes as the cursor hovers over his name. Should I, should I, should I? She gulps and then clicks hard on the last email from him before pulling her hand back qu
ickly, as if the mouse and keyboard themselves might harm her.
Put the money back and I won’t come looking for you.
Fuck. She can’t breathe. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She bangs down on the keyboard, hits the delete key and holds it, wiping away his name, sweeping away all the other names in there as well, Phelan too, clearing her whole inbox, then clearing trash. Getting as far away from him as possible, eliminating him, cleansing herself. But as she sits in the chair gazing at the empty inbox, hugging herself, rocking on the chair’s spindly legs, a new email comes in. It feels like retaliation.
There’s nowhere to hide. Put the money back in first. Then bring Blake back.
She stares at the message. It seems to fill the whole screen, seems to pulse, until the blood behind her eyes starts throbbing in agreement with it. She stands, worried suddenly about Blake alone in the caravan. Bang. Delete. Shut down.
When the rain stops she asks for directions to Picnic Point.
‘It’s up on the range,’ the manager tells her, looking at her now. ‘At the end of Tourist Drive. You can’t miss it. All roads lead to Picnic Point.’
‘Rubbish,’ the man’s wife interjects, appearing through the doorway from their flatette. She wears large owl-wise dark-rimmed glasses, has bare shoulders, and startling fluorescent blue hair. She carries a paperback novel in both hands.
‘Rubbish yourself,’ he retorts before rising from his chair and abandoning the reception to his wife.
‘Love,’ the woman says to her, setting her book almost reverently on the counter, ‘this isn’t Rome. But the view you get from up there is second to none … Second to none … There’s a bit of a café, though you’ll get cheaper coffees elsewhere. And there’s a good park for the young ’un to play in.’