Cry a bit. Say, ‘Fuck Til.’ Whisper it. Three times. Like it’ll bring her back. Open my eyes. Hear that sound. Fuck’s that sound?
I worked in a factory doing quality control. I looked for broken lids on jam jars that trundled by on the black, and I’m afraid to say, rather filthy rubber belt. Funny. My parents had had hopes for me. I’d done well in Maths at high school. They’d lined me up for uni, and I’d almost started a science course, but then Til and I met one night in World Bar in Kings Cross in a corner, in the back. She’d had black nails. She’d liked the beats that drugs gave off. The warm fug. We spent four years doing pot and brickloads of hammer, sometimes ice, but it makes my head ache and Til too skinny. She left because she’d had enough. She didn’t say what of. I guess she meant me. Of living where we lived, in the worst shithole block of flats in Redfern. Everyone we knew smoked some form of chem. We didn’t like ice, though, as I’ve said. We smoked hash. We smoked bongs. We loved smoking crack. It calmed my nerves, which was always shocking. Then it killed me – the word we used for coming down – for three days straight.
I didn’t like thinking about my past too much. Til always tried to get it out, though, dredge it up, but I’d deflect. Once I told her my dad used to whip me with a chain while Mum watched through a gap in the bedroom door. It was bullshit, but Til believed it, tearing up, rocking back and forth with her knees to her chin. Yes, she said. YES. It all makes sense. You poor bastard. She took my lies and ran with them, as if they made excuses for how I was, and how she was too. She came from a well-off family, just like me. She knew, like I did, we were bored rich kids with no talent for real life in the real world. Maybe we resented that. Our lack of focus. Our easy lives. Or maybe we just loved drugs, the way they made our bodies rush, let our minds drift, unmoored, on a fizzing bed of air.
I’m standing in my room again. It’s ten at night and I can’t hear the noise yet. I know, though, it will come at some point. Just as I’m about to fall asleep it comes. The last three nights it’s come like that. On that brink. In that grey-zone of mocking dream space. I didn’t hear it when Til was here. Or if I did, I didn’t notice. Maybe it’s a rat somewhere in the ceiling. Perhaps a possum’s in the wall. I wonder if I get up in the roof cavity whether I’ll find it. But I hate small cavities. When I’m coming down off something sharp, it’s small cavities that wrack my sleep, my nightmares. I’ve dreamed of being trapped in caves that’ve fallen in, in buildings that have crumbled. I’ve dreamed of being stuck inside a coffin. But I’m not coming down tonight. Which is to say I’m sober for the first time in four years if you don’t count the long necks I drank after work. I haven’t smoked since Sunday. It’s Thursday. I’m trying to see things clearer. Like, if I could just see things clearer...
Til, I say.
I sit down on the green, furry lounge with its frayed arms, its sunken seat. I’m waiting for the scratching. The room’s dark. Through the only window, streetlight dimly shines, silver, cold, as if from planet moon. Grime’s caked across the glass. In it, a picture of the sun, a circle with spokes coming off it that Til had drawn just before she left. I’m waiting for the noise and now I hear it. Scratch.
Scratch, scratch.
It’s slow at first, an idea, but then it builds, is real. It could be an animal. It sounds like one. Claws on wood. Teeth on bone. Stand back up. Walk to window.
Til, I say.
Yes?
I turn around.
Where’d you come from?
She looks at me. Across the dark square of living space, she gazes. I can’t see her eyes, but I know what she wants.
Come in, I say. Get in here.
She waits, as if too much in pain to move. Then she comes in and sits down and I put the kettle on, get out the spoons and the other stuff from the place beneath the sink we’ve always kept it. It’s good to see her. Although I don’t say as much. We’re too focused on the spoon, the lighter, the sudden piercing of our flesh. Then the light that comes after that. No. Not the light. Its opposite. The anti-light. The blackness. It enshrouds us. Like balm.
And there.
We lie.
Later, who knows when, maybe six in the morning, maybe after that, on another day or week in another world, we spin in bed and come down slowly. I hear nothing but the silent hum of my dying. And Til’s too, who dies beside me. This, we share. If nothing else.
And of the sound? Its awful, cruel, insistent scratch? Remember that?
There’s no sign.
Ha.
No trace at all.
The Heights
Which is why, I guess, it made sense that I was anxious. You might think that’s sad. Or anyway, you might think I was being indulgent. Here stood another white man, tall and suited, not to mention employed, whinging about his life. You poor thing. Do you want someone to hold your head to their chest so you can sob into it?
For God’s sake.
Get a grip on it.
I stood before the mirror at Nick’s Grill House, in the bathroom with the hand drier somehow stuck on, roaring a high, Antarctic moan, and getting higher. Who needs hand driers anyway? Are we that precious? Is this what we’ve come to, machines tending our every trifling need? I turned the tap off and shook my hands above the sink and considered my reflection. Then I glanced down, repulsed. The lighting in here, it made me look like something hung in a cool room.
My mitts weren’t much better though. Veiny, bulbous, hairy, nails chewed. Skin chalky. I breathed out, long and slow. Most people call that a sigh. I thought of it more as the beginning of my resignation. One that had fought for a place in my mind all these years and that, by sheer delusion, I’d kept at bay. No longer. I was ready now. Or if not ready, at least willing to entertain it. Usher it in through the door. Down the hallway. Into the lounge room. Pour it a wine. Show it a seat. Tell it you’ve decided, at long last, to give it the rope it’s begged for. And what was it? What the hell was I complaining about?
Oh yeah.
That’s right.
Tomorrow, I was turning forty.
The hand drier went off then. As I looked back up at myself, all went deathly quiet.
‘You were gone a long time. Fall in?’
Sue had been making the same joke for so long I’d decided the day she didn’t make it was the day she’d started having an affair. Or had fallen out of love with me. Something seismic. Enough to throw her off her tracks, which she’d stayed on, with poise, precision, grace I guess, since I’d first got to know her. We’d met fifteen years ago. I hadn’t been the romantic type before our introduction and I didn’t become one afterwards. Sue worked in tax too, though, so it panned out.
‘I fell in,’ I said, taking my seat. ‘I got out, though. And now I’m feeling very fresh.’
She had her eyes on the menu, which blocked the bottom of her face. She could have had them closed for all I knew, they’d narrowed into such thin slits as she read, and for a second I imagined her there, falling asleep in her chair at Nick’s Grill House, her glasses hanging on for dear life at the end of her nose.
‘I thought you looked a little fresher,’ she said, without glancing up. ‘I think I’ll get the eye fillet.’
She placed the menu on the table and looked at me.
‘And a side of greens.’
I gazed at her. How was she so composed? Did she not see it? Or was her mild thirty-eight blinding her still? When I’d been thirty-eight, I’d sure as hell known it. She either knew it and was pretending, or she had no idea about it and, as a result, about anything else. Two dimples appeared in her cheeks, which meant she must’ve smiled at me. It was hard to tell exactly. The lighting was dim, the candle on the table cast her face in eerie shadows that drifted with the flame. I was beginning to think she didn’t know it, when she said, ‘Mike? You’re thinking about death aren’t you?’
Finally! I thought. So there it was. She at least had a sense of it.
‘What makes you think that?’
She loo
ked across to the next table; a waiter was taking orders. A tall, lithe, young man in a fitted white shirt and bow-tie. He was probably thirteen.
‘You know,’ she said, looking back at me, ‘just because your father died at forty, doesn’t mean you will.’
The waiter turned around, began his short stroll towards us. I wanted to tell her that’s where she was wrong, in a fierce triumphant hiss. That’s what you think. But we hadn’t even ordered yet. She really looked too lovely, anyway, in her green dress with her hair out, to cop my gripes tonight. Besides, deep down I knew, statistically speaking, she was more than likely right.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘honey, I know, it’s just…’ Jesus! I couldn’t help myself, ‘that’s where you’re wrong.’
She rolled her eyes. She ordered. For both of us. The kid about-faced and left us to ourselves. My wife was the kind of woman who didn’t let you fool yourself. Her logic always stopped it. She listened to everything, calmly, then offered her shiny pearl, always economically, in a dozen words or less.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Is your mother still alive?’
‘Don’t jinx her,’ I said.
‘She’s almost eighty.’
‘So?’
‘Do the maths, Mike.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Wait. What’s the maths?’
‘Take an average. Sixty. And that’s a minimum.’
‘I’ll be dead in twenty years then.’
‘With God’s grace.’
‘Hey.’
‘Kidding.’
The waiter appeared with our glasses of wine.
‘To your health,’ said my wife.
‘Don’t jinx me,’ I said.
When I was thirty-six, I’d developed a hernia. The surgery, my doctor had said, was remarkably simple. Just a matter of peeling back the fat on my abdomen, forcing the small bowel back through the tear in my muscle wall, and fixing a titanium mesh the size of a playing card across it, to ensure those wormy guts stayed put. Oh yeah, I thought in his office the morning he explained it, that is simple.
He said I needn’t worry at all, across the desk, in his white coat, one eye scanning the screen. He said I was so young and healthy I’d be back in shape in no time. Little comfort. I told him what was on my mind.
‘My father,’ I said, ‘had the same thing.’
At this, he remained stoic. ‘But of course,’ he said, flatly. ‘It runs in families.’
But of course?
I ran down the surgery steps a short time later and onto the street. I went straight to a supermarket, where I bought two litres of sugar-free vegetable juice. I sat in my car, drinking it. And thinking about my father. He’d had a hernia at thirty-six, just like me, and then, at forty, he’d dropped dead in an operating theatre. It wasn’t even his operation. A cardio-thoracic surgeon, he’d made it halfway through replacing someone’s aorta when a pain in his own chest sizzled up from nowhere. He clutched at his nurses like a blind man, they told my mother, before dropping to the floor. I often wondered if they’d yelled out, ‘Is anyone here a doctor?’ as he sucked in his last breaths.
‘You know,’ Sue said as our steaks arrived. ‘This is probably not the time to bring it up, but have you heard the latest on red meat?’
I stuffed a white and blue chequered napkin into my collar, picked up my fork and serrated knife. ‘It kills you, doesn’t it?’
She had already started eating. ‘Mmm,’ she said, her mouth half-full.
‘What?’
‘Sorry,’ she said; she reached for the wooden pepper shaker in the middle of the table. ‘It causes inflammation.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Arterial walls.’
‘The heart muscle too.’
‘Excellent,’ I said. I sipped my wine. I hadn’t eaten any steak yet. I put the glass back on the table, pinched its stem, stared at the blood-red liquid. I could feel her eyes on me; I suspected she had something reassuring to say. And I was right. Anti-inflammatories were the way of the future. Expected to slash early deaths by half within a decade. There were stats. Numbers. She had them all.
‘Great,’ I said.
I started eating.
‘Happy fortieth, darling.’
My steak tasted as if, very recently, it had been alive.
The next morning our two daughters ran into our bedroom on schedule, at seven a.m. Saturdays had become a kind of boot camp. And not of the recreational type. They were militant, both in their dearth of peace and the stress to which they exposed the body. Alice, nine, and Anna, six, jumped up and down on the mattress. They screamed, they sang. Birthdays, I’d learned, were the worst of all.
‘Daddy! Come and get your present.’
In my mouth, last night’s meat lingered. A metallic, bloody memory. I followed them down the hall in my boxer shorts and white bed shirt, desperate for a glass of water. Somehow, Sue had already gotten up, showered, cooked eggs, baked a cake and recorded last night’s babysitting payment in the black book she kept by the fruit bowl. In the kitchen, across the bench, she handed me a juice. And a water. I loved her.
‘What have we here,’ I said, as Alice and Anna presented me with a box. Red wrapping. Black and gold bow. I shook it in my hands, my ear to it.
They both screamed. ‘Noo!’
‘Sorry,’ I said. I looked up at Sue, who was smirking at the breadboard, cutting fruit. ‘Girls,’ I said, peering back down at them. ‘Why don’t you do the honours.’
They looked at each other. ‘But it’s his birthday.’ They always conferred like this, as if, like magic, they’d gone off into a soundproof booth, where no one else could hear them, and where they could speak with impunity, and cutting resolve.
‘It’s ‘cos he’s grumpy.’
‘Dad’s always grumpy.’
‘In the morning mainly.’
‘And after dinner.’
‘It’s his birthday, though.’
‘Yes.’
‘So he should open it.’
‘Yeah.’
They looked back up at me, about to speak.
‘Okay,’ I said, before they could do so. ‘Here,’ and I put the box on the bench and tore it apart with my gnarled hands.
Tiny holes. The top of a cardboard lid. From it, I was sure, rose life’s soupy scent. My girls clasped their hands to their chests. I had never seen eyes so wide.
‘Oh wow,’ I said, removing the lid. ‘It’s…wait. What is it?’
‘A biird!’ they said together.
‘A cockatiel,’ said Sue.
It stood there in a tiny cage, whose fine metal bars were, doubtless, as fragile as its bones. It had a sky-blue plumage, a creamy head; a red stripe slashed across the face like a wound. I couldn’t believe they’d done this. I looked at Sue. She was smirking still, but as she saw my face hers turned, then walked, then fled from mirth.
‘What?’
‘You don’t remember?’
She clearly didn’t.
‘My dad? Um, Sue? He’d had a bird? Named Graham?’
My wife raised a hand to cover her mouth. At first I thought she’d gone red from embarrassment. Soon, though, I realised she was suppressing a laugh.
‘Girls,’ I said, without looking at my daughters. ‘Thank you for my gift. Daddy’s very happy.’
I sat on an old plastic chair after breakfast on the old wooden porch that looked out across the yard, whose old slope up towards the back fence seemed to groan under the weight of its steady incline. Decline, depending on where you stood. I checked my watch. Ten thirty. Well and truly forty now. Only a matter of time before last night’s steak exploded in my chest, got stuck in a pipe, turned my blood to fire, or whatever it was carnitine did to a man on a weekend morning, here, in the height of his life.
The door opened behind me, then gently closed. Sue stood by my shoulder and handed me a cup.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘If you’re gonna die, you may as well be focused.’
I took the coffee.
‘The gir
ls have named him Louis.’
I went to look up at my wife, but because she was half behind me, I had to lean my head back and gaze at her upside down.
‘You look different,’ I said. ‘Have you changed your hair?’
‘Why don’t you come inside and we’ll feed him some seeds?’ she said, walking around in front of me.
I sat up straight and shook my head, looked into my lap and, with great effect, pretended to sob. ‘That’s what Dad used to do with Graham.’
My wife let out a single laugh. ‘When he was ten!’
‘It’s an omen,’ I said, looking at her. ‘And you bloody well know it.’
‘Look,’ she said, kneeling down, a hand on my knee. She did this whenever she was about to suggest I pull my head in. By getting low to the ground, she thought she could weaken my guard, then strike while I, enfeebled by her softness, her closeness, peered dreamily at her eyes. ‘Can you forget about your genes, Mike, just for today? The girls,’ she said, ‘are waiting for you. They need you alive, my big old goof, at least while you’re alive.’
‘In other words,’ I said. ‘Pull my head in.’
She stood up, took a big gulp of coffee. ‘Ahh,’ she said, after swallowing. Then she looked at the cup as if it were a relic from history, a marvel she’d not before held in her unknowing hands. ‘Yes,’ she said, and then she went back inside.
The day had been planned two months earlier. Because Sue and I were both in tax, and our girls looked like they’d grow up to work in tax too, the family operated according to spreadsheets, divided into tabs, each split into hourly rows, and colour-coded (for the girls).
It was eleven a.m. by the time we climbed into the Subaru and began the drive to Darling Harbour. A half-hour later than planned. We’d taken some time to place Louis in his bigger cage, feed him, and generally get him settled. I’d suggested leaving him in the hallway cupboard with a light on, but the girls insisted he be stationed by the living room window, so he could gaze out through his bars at a wide blue sky.
No Neat Endings Page 4