Trick of the Light

by Laura Elvery

  Dr Butler tapped the backspace button. ‘Hard to say.’ He held it down and peered at the screen. On his desk, like a trophy, was a rubber patella with the tendons exposed.

  ‘And would I be covered?’

  ‘As I said, six to twelve months of physiotherapy, if you want any chance of regaining full movement.’

  I remembered what I’d already paid him. Then I multiplied it and kept multiplying it. Brad had told me not to get my hopes up about how soon I’d be back to normal. I perched on the edge of my chair and reached for the walking stick.

  Tap tap tap on the keyboard. Dr Butler glanced up. ‘Do you want the girls to organise it for you?’

  ‘I’ll ring you back tomorrow.’

  I left Dr Butler and his slick offices and limped towards Flinders Street station past Fed Square. I was getting pretty good at using my walking stick, but strangers still stared – I was young and female with a fat right leg inside jeans I couldn’t face taking off. I’d hired the metal walking stick from a hospital chemist. Brad said it would be cheaper in the long run to start our own walking-stick factory and sell them to Sudanese child soldiers.

  ‘Cheaper for who?’ I’d asked, folding the receipt inside my purse.

  Yesterday, Brad’s boss told him that he needed to be more flexible. More prepared to fail in the pursuit of holistic organisational goals. Brad said it made him feel like his job was precarious.

  ‘So? Suck it up,’ I said, thinking of our online bank balance since I first went to see Dr Butler. The red line for money out. The green line lagging behind: money in. ‘Be more flexible.’

  There was a hamburger stand at the edge of Fed Square, a head-sized fibreglass burger spinning lazily on a spike from its roof. School was out; students in Brad’s old uniform reclined beneath the television screen, fixated on their phones. When I was small, my parents brought me here to watch the tennis. I remember the scuba blue of the court, the punctuated hits and sighs and cheers coming from the screen, and the glacial white of the players’ polos sliding into view on the big screen.

  I’m not going to try to tell you what I saw next was normal, but at first I thought it was an ad for something – another way for a company to stand out from all the noise. I was watching the schoolboys, shot through with a memory of teenage Brad jumping down from the tram to meet me after class, when I noticed a woman give her daughter a pat on the head, their faces turned to each other. The girl was skinny, in pigtails and a dark red leotard with short, sequined ruffles for a skirt. Two ruffles on one side, but only one on the other, like its pair had been ripped away.

  The woman placed a black hat on the ground and the girl ran towards the big concrete structure that housed the television screen. She started climbing up the side. And, yes, it had my attention, but at the time I didn’t think it was truly that strange. I had stopped to rest anyway. Lately I’d been carrying all my things around in a backpack, but I’d grabbed a handbag on my way to Dr Butler’s because I’d been so sure of good news. I wanted to feel normal again. But the shoulder bag was too unwieldy, so I sat down and leant my walking stick on the edge of the garden. I twisted the strap of my handbag around my good leg. Anyone wanting to steal from me again would, frankly, be choosing the right person.

  A few others were noticing the girl too, this small creature in a leotard scuttling up the side of the screen, finding footholds and handholds, trying one or two out and rejecting them, but mostly seeming to know her way to the top. And then I saw that there was a line, a wire, strung from the top of the screen to the top of the building opposite, four storeys high. There used to be a museum there, or an art gallery.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ The mother’s accent was European sing-song-something. A voice for cursing out a window. I thought it was a black dress she was wearing, but it was a cape, nipped in at her throat. She tottered in sparkly slippers. ‘Welcome! Up there is my daughter, Mila, a world-class acrobat. What you’re about to see may shock and surprise you, but hopefully inspire you.’

  I gathered my hands in my lap. ‘She’s going to walk it.’ I glanced around. I’d said the words aloud, not meaning to. But this seemed like a thing to watch with someone else.

  Mila’s mother indicated the open mouth of the velvet hat. ‘If you’re charmed by Mila, if she thrills you, if she makes your belly turn topsy-turvy, then please show your amazement with a coin or two or three!’

  A pair of women on the seat beside me clapped half-heartedly.

  ‘That is so dangerous,’ murmured one. ‘That’s child labour.’

  The other addressed the sky. ‘They must really need the money.’

  ‘If you can’t afford to have kids then you shouldn’t have them.’

  ‘Maybe they didn’t know till they had them.’

  Brad and I agreed children were too expensive for us, too expensive for the world. That operation, twelve months ago, had been cheaper than my knee. That doctor kept a set of rubber fallopian tubes pinned to the wall behind him. And I left feeling no great pain, feeling no different, and I didn’t vomit once.

  I saw then that Mila’s mother’s slippers had once been stilettos, but that the heels were gone. Without them, the shoes couldn’t flatten to the ground and she had to walk on tiptoe.

  She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted. ‘Are you ready, Mila?’

  Mila gave an Olympic smile, nodded, raised her arms and pointed a toe onto the wire. I gasped and the women beside me did too. The boys in their striped ties panned their phones up to start filming. Mila’s mother kept her focus on the ground, didn’t watch her daughter’s steps along the wire, instead nudging the hat with the toe of her shoe, grinning at me and the other strangers. Twenty or thirty of us dolloped in groups between the hamburger caravan and the screen.

  ‘No way,’ I whispered.

  The two women balled up their food wrappers and tucked them into the garden before they left.

  Above us, Mila flexed and tricked her toes along the wire. She held her arms out for balance. She was a thin red scrap testing the air. Alongside her, the Yarra meandered, its surface crawling with car-sized rubbish collectors like water beetles. Flinders Street station was a golden medallion sinking into the river bank. Inside the station, there were more sleeping bags than train services now.

  ‘What if she falls?’ The cut in my knee, the incision where Dr Butler had sent his scalpel, worked its way back into my mind.

  Mila’s mother was by my side in an instant. ‘Ah, but she will not,’ her line went. ‘She has been an acrobat since the day she could walk. Why, Mila could stand on her head before she could talk.’

  ‘She’s quite amazing.’

  ‘Do you have children?’ For some reason the woman motioned at my walking stick.

  ‘Yes.’

  The woman liked my lie.

  ‘Two daughters.’

  ‘Ah, then you understand little girls.’

  ‘They tackled me when we were playing soccer at the park,’ I continued. ‘So, my knee.’

  Mila’s mother skipped over to the hat and brought it back, beaming. ‘Lovely,’ she said, offering it to me. ‘Perhaps you would like to show Mila your encouragement?’

  ‘Mine are at home. With their dad.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  I pictured a pair of daughters somersaulting off the couch. Two little fabrications in leotards stretched tight across their bellies. ‘We’ve never thought about taking them to gymnastics. A bit dangerous, maybe. And all that body-image stuff, you know? But this, I mean, with your Mila. It makes me think.’

  Mila – she must have been five or six years old – was more than halfway across the wire. She pointed her toes, her pale legs, with each step. Half a dozen tourists took photos from low angles so they could be in the shots too. I knew for sure then the girl would make it. No one takes a photo on their phone of a child acrobat before she
falls. This woman, her mother, had it all under control.

  I steadied myself to standing, gripped the walking stick and took a step away from the black hat with its clutch of coins.

  But I’d forgotten the handbag looped around my left ankle, there so I’d feel the tug if someone tried to mug me again. I fell suddenly, awkwardly, shamefully onto my right leg. And the walking stick did nothing, and the jeans covering my compression bandage did nothing. I hit the concrete. Pain torched through my knee, an exquisite sharpness, metallic and loathsome. The yowl from my mouth was clownish. One second I was on my feet with the black hat and the golden sun in my vision – a vague thought that Brad and I might be able to afford to go out for burgers later – and the next I was sprawled face-down, my arse high.

  I couldn’t remember the dimensions of my own body. But I could picture Dr Butler typing on his keyboard, my name back in his system as he grabbed the rubber knee and scooted on his wheeled office chair around his desk.

  Now.

  Here.

  See?

  ‘Oh,’ Mila’s mother said. The word got swept away at the end as though she was turning to look for help, or glancing up at her daughter.

  I saw Mila’s mother above me through tears. Tremendous pain was working to distil my life to two pinpricks of time. Nothing else existed except the two moments in which I had lain face-down on concrete with my heart dopplering against my ribs.

  The spangled knife, the velvet hat.

  The opiated man, the spangled acrobat.

  In the first, I had a cheekful of cold concrete while the man who had mugged me jogged away. In the second, the concrete was warm. In both, my head was packed with fear.

  ‘Your bag, my darling,’ Mila’s mother said. ‘You tripped over your bag. Can you call your husband?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And, oh, already with your leg and the walking stick.’

  ‘Did she make it?’

  ‘Wait there – I have to go. Here is your bag.’ She laid it by my hand where it crumpled like a shot cat.

  I remembered how Dr Butler had told me that women are more likely to injure their knees. Not a weakness, he said, but a predisposition. We jump to the ground with our legs straighter than men. When we menstruate our muscle tissue becomes elastic. Maybe we pivot when we shouldn’t. Dr Butler showed me a clip of a Russian gymnast landing after a complicated aerial manoeuvre.

  I began to sob.

  From across the square came the freefall of a cheer. Mila must have made it across and then down to safety. I guessed she was getting cuddles and high-fives from those tourists, and from her mother.

  I felt around for my bag, but it was gone.

  Deer Lane

  The boy lives on Deer Lane, which Jen discovered when she looked through the paper folders in the school office. Confidential information is supposed to be stored electronically, in databases, but in the last week of the school year she slipped into the storage room next to the trophy cabinet. There was no interest from anyone, no spark of suspicion. On the boy’s file next to his photo were the names of his father and mother, and Jen forgot them, quickly and deliberately.

  Today she wakes after lunchtime. She has disguised the fatigue and excess of six weeks’ school holidays with a short and flimsy wraparound, a dress that sticks to her thighs in the heat. Polyester floral with a spare button still sewn to the inside tag. It cost fifteen dollars from a shop beside the train station. An observation: the cheaper the better. The silk blouse she bought herself for her birthday receives fewer comments from the boy, less interest. Doesn’t mean she’ll never wear the silk blouse. But his preferences are interesting.

  Her car is new. She has money now, her teacher’s pay-cheque regular and decent. When Grandpa died, the car that had belonged to him and Gran went to her, and she sold it. It was a hefty Falcon without power steering, slow to react, even though Gran made it seem easy when they’d driven Grandpa to appointments for his glaucoma. He would concentrate on finding a song on the radio they’d all like: it was a job he could do, eye patches on, fingers on the dial, not needing to see.

  Now, in her bright blue hatchback, Jen slows down from eighty ks and chooses a parking spot on a vacant block next to a service station, a street away from Deer Lane. She turns off the engine and gets out. It’s January and the body of the car is hot to touch. She gazes around at the scrub set back from the road. A wolfish word, capitalised, comes to her: Rural. A few houses cower behind fences that look unfinished, or perhaps were never properly started. Three trucks, one after the other, hurl their violent bulk around the bend. The short grass bakes on the vast empty blocks and a coiny stink drifts from the river. How did such a handsome boy emerge from a place like this? She doesn’t waste time on it. She wants to touch him and be touched by him.

  For months she has been firm with herself. But this morning, temptation pulsed through her.

  One day in November, after the first bell to signal the end of the period, in the spare minutes before Jen’s next class showed up, the boy stopped a metre away from her. The others pushed past and out the door. The boy’s feet were planted wide, his bag tucked between them. Poking out of one unzipped side were a water bottle and the thin tangle of earbuds. She loved to see him talking. He lifted a long brown arm to point and Jen felt desire like something wrenched from her. She knew how to draw him out with easy questions. Where would he like to visit?

  ‘Dubrovnik. It’s in Europe, on the Mediterranean. Where bits of Game of Thrones are filmed?’

  ‘Yes, I know Dubrovnik,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t on the Mediterranean.’

  ‘It is. Isn’t it?’

  ‘No. The Adriatic.’

  ‘Well. That’s where I want to go.’ His smile came as unexpectedly as rainwater tipped from a hat.

  The second bell rang. Jen felt a shiver through her. The boy lingered till students from her next class arrived and she waved them over, not at all happy to see them. ‘Hello, early birds!’ she called.

  Perhaps she would tell him, another time, that she had visited Dubrovnik, three years ago. In the centre of the old town, a crowd of people gathered around a man with enormous birds on his shoulders. The birds were red and green and blue, reptilian. Beaks like scythes. Eyes like beads. A woman paid the man, who placed the smallest bird, the size and shape of a pineapple, onto the bare shoulder of the woman’s daughter, a teenager in a bikini top.

  In Dubrovnik, the doors of tiny restaurants were lit with spherical lamps. Jen trotted out her Australian accent but no one was interested. She ate alone, ordering plates of fried squid and briny octopus salad.

  Back in Australia, in this regular life – the one she imagines she’ll have for a while – Jen dares herself to jog ten kilometres every day. She dares herself to run out of fresh food in the fridge, to work the end of a pen through a hole in her pocket and into her thigh during assembly. To flirt, listlessly, with a co-worker after a staff meeting. To eavesdrop on details of her students’ teenage parties, imagining herself there, whole and young on the cold lawn. To say the boy’s name aloud while she lies on the lounge room floor. To bite her fingernails down to the quick. To live, each week, on only thirty dollars’ worth of groceries. To only sometimes wear a bra. Reuse her underwear, no washing.

  All that money she saves, maybe she’ll go back to Dubrovnik.

  The late afternoon heat scrapes at her. Jen leans in over the driver’s seat, grabs her phone, goes to Instagram and finds the boy’s account. She stares at a photo of him in board shorts at the bottom of a water slide. Sometimes she scrolls through other kids’ feeds, though none as closely. Most of their accounts are public despite the pleas from the cyber-crime consultants. She is careful not to double-tap on a photo, moving gently through half a dozen images that are new since yesterday, and then on to the ones she recognises.

  Images, evidence of what they do in
their spare time. The idiotic things these kids get up to repulse and excite her. Their gluttony and recklessness with food, their attempts to swallow spoonfuls of cinnamon: it makes her feel physically ill. That the body should be contaminated in this way, that they do not understand what all these threats can do – it disgusts her. They think the body is endless, is reliable. That it has a membrane.

  An observation: it may happen today, or another day, or never.

  Another observation: before she became aware of her body as a thing the boy desired, she knew herself to be dumpy and uninteresting. She wasn’t wrong: how you know yourself is how you really are. But she became aware of his attention, like the slow twisting of the dial on her grandparents’ old car stereo, tuning into a radio station. First: noise, chaotic and undesired. Then: electric clarity.

  Three years ago, at a point high up on the red brick wall that circled the old town of Dubrovnik, Jen stood with a tour guide. As her fellow tourists milled around at the brick ledge, she asked the guide a question about the war. The man said it was difficult for people to talk about and he turned away, towards the water. He said one more thing: There are no simple answers. She wanted to know where people stood now, what he’d observed about citizens’ allegiances and grudges. But the man refused to answer and Jen left the tour early. Don’t be a guide and take my money if you feel that way, she thought, but didn’t say. Don’t pretend people don’t love to share the worst things they’ve seen and done.

  The trucks have disappeared completely when she notices a man on the other side of the road. She watches him pulling a dog on a leash, like, Stay cool, buddy. Jen knows he will walk to her, and it unlocks a familiar feeling.

  The man – he’s at least sixty – pauses. ‘You need a hand?’ he asks.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  His face is marked with acne scars. ‘You sure? People often say no when they mean yes.’