by Paige Clark
When my boyfriend comes inside to find me, I ask him to look at my web browsing history. The dull glow of the computer makes me feel like we are underwater and my boyfriend is a krill—nothing but translucent pale limbs. I think to myself, He is not strong, because I am angry this has happened to me and not to him.
My search history reveals I am contemplating parasuicide, because like my boyfriend guessed, I am not brave enough to kill myself all the way. He does not say this, but just holds me in his crustacean arms. The room is freezing so, when I finally fall asleep, shivering, I dream I am in a hospital ward with cream-coloured walls and a nurse who places a warm hand gently on my forehead. She looks nothing like my mother.
In the morning when I wake up, I inform my boyfriend I am leaving him. The reason I give him is that I need to be alone for a while. The actual reason is that when he sleeps his breathing is quiet and his delicate hands are icy and I can’t tell if he is alive or dead.
He says, ‘I will give you the space you want and I’ll be here if you need me.’
I suspect more than ever he is not really alive.
He packs his things to go to his mother’s house. I yell at him, ‘At least you have a mother!’ just to make sure he knows that even though I am breaking his heart, I am still more broken.
When I was nine, I fell out of a tree and broke my arm, so I know what it feels like to fall and I know what it feels like to be broken. On the way home from the hospital, my mother and I stopped off at the video store and bought the deluxe VHS box set of The Sound of Music. I watched it on repeat while the painkillers wore off. My mother ran her hand across my face—my forehead, my eyebrows, my cheekbones—until I could finally fall asleep. When it’s on TV the day my boyfriend moves out, I can’t believe my luck.
But I’ve forgotten one thing: the von Trapp children need a governess because their mother is dead.
A few days later, I try to call my boyfriend. But the connection makes him sound like he is on loudspeaker and I can’t think of anything to say, so I hang up. At night I can’t sleep and I lie awake in bed thinking of a warm body.
I find this in my next-door neighbour, a man who is a centimetre shorter than I am and twice my age. I run into him at the supermarket. In his shopping cart, there is a beef roast, summer vegetables and expensive cheese. In mine, there is a packet of ibuprofen and instant noodles. He invites me over for dinner and I accept. He has a cleft lip and the unformed face of a baby born too soon, so I know that, like me, his mother has failed him in some way. He chain-smokes menthol cigarettes and is the fastest walker I have ever known. He is always overheated and his skin has an unhealthy, sweaty sheen.
Over dinner, I exaggerate: I tried to kill myself. I watch him and know he is trying to find the appropriate response, like There is something to live for, but instead says nothing because he knows that’s not true. I reach out across the table and run my finger across the scar on his lip and his whole body shakes as if he is having a bad dream.
By the time I get home from dinner, I have four missed calls from my boyfriend but I do not call him back.
My mother always hated how Hollywood loves to kill off the protagonist’s mother. ‘Why not the father?’ she would ask.
See, she died before her own mother did, so she doesn’t know what I know. Lose your mother and you lose everything.
This is why, three nights later, I ask the neighbour to spend the night at my house. I withdraw fifty dollars from my boyfriend’s cheque account and buy a twenty-six-dollar bottle of wine and expensive shampoo. When the man arrives, he says the smell of my washed hair is intoxicating and I envision swaddling him with it as you would a newborn baby. I kiss him for the first time and sample menthol cigarettes and sticky, nervous sweat. He wraps my hair around my neck like a noose. Later, when we fall asleep, he cradles me in his arms and places a damp hand on my forehead. His breathing echoes through the house and I sleep well and dream of nothing.
I wake up to a phone call from my boyfriend that I do not answer. He leaves a voicemail that says, ‘I have booked you in for a session with a therapist. Please go.’ I am furious because my boyfriend loves to solve problems by not doing anything at all.
When I mention this casually to the man, he thinks therapy is a good idea, so I decide to try it. I trust this man because he has excellent taste in cheese and overactive sweat glands. He often says nothing instead of the wrong thing, and for that, I think, I owe him my whole life.
The part Hollywood leaves out is how easy it is to die. How not breathing is just as easy as breathing. I spent the final days of my mother’s life dipping sponge-tipped swabs into plastic hospital cups of thickened lemon-flavoured water and running them against her dry tongue, her parched lips. At first her mouth closed around the swabs like a child sucking a pacifier, but then she forgot how to swallow and her mouth hung wide like an open door letting in a draught.
My therapist’s office is the front room of his house. There is nothing to say it is anything but a living room other than the therapist who sits on a black swivel office chair and the rows of books whose titles are all the things wrong with you—depression, anger, psychosis. There is a box of no-brand tissues on the coffee table that look scratchy and too thin, daring me not to break down. My therapist does not say much except ‘How does that make you feel?’ I do not know how I feel, but I know that question infuriates me.
I tell him that I left my boyfriend because he reminds me of a corpse and that I found a lover who reminds me of nothing except occasionally sex and d’Affinois. My therapist says, ‘And whose corpse does your boyfriend remind you of ?’ and I like this question even less.
My boyfriend picks me up from my therapist’s house and I know it immediately—the corpse he reminds me of is my own.
I used to be afraid, but now I am not scared of anything. I’d cross to the other side of the street if a stranger had an eye that looked the wrong way or unwashed hair. I held my breath when my boyfriend drove too fast on the freeway or a plane I was on encountered turbulence. I knocked on wood, a prayer that the things that could go wrong wouldn’t. What I didn’t know then is that part of living is being afraid of dying.
My boyfriend drives me back to our house and I do not ask him to come in. His eyes are fishbowls of held-back tears and he tells me that he misses me. I say, ‘Me too.’
When I hear him drive away and I check the window to make sure he’s left, I call the neighbour on the phone. He does not answer. I make myself a packet of instant-noodle soup for dinner, but since I can barely eat, it goes cold. I try to wash my hair in the shower but instead I stand there until the hot water runs lukewarm. When I get out, I towel off, shivering, with dirty hair.
I try calling the neighbour again and this time he answers. Over the phone, his breath does not smell of menthol; his flesh does not radiate any heat. He asks, ‘Are you alright?’ and this time I am the one to say nothing. I picture the next time I see him at the grocery store shopping for cigarettes and gruyere—our interaction casual, as if nothing has passed between us at all.
The air conditioner has been running for weeks but I will not turn it off until my lips go blue. I find my way to bed and bury myself beneath the covers. For what feels like the first time ever I am by myself, no hand on my forehead to soothe me, no body to comfort me except my own.
I sleep well and dream of my mother.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to the Australian Commonwealth Government and the University of Melbourne for their contributions to this book.
Thank you again and again and again to Jocelyn Richardson for reading every word of this manuscript before I even dreamt it could be a book. To Timothy Balfour for your keen eye. To Amanda Johnson for your encouragement and guidance. And to all of my teachers at the University of Melbourne, especially Odette Kelada and Hayley Singer.
My thanks to my first reader and biggest fan, Jessie. And to the cutest dogs in the world, past and present: Mickey and Freddie. To all
my family but especially Dad, Ty, Tracy, Sarah, Erin, Anna, Lilly, Sarah Lee, Moei, Todd and Malin. To all of my friends, who live near different oceans and also in landlocked places. Thank you for saving my life. And to you, Adrian, always. I’ll keep working on your legacy.
Thank you to the team at Allen & Unwin, in particular Tom Bailey-Smith, Samantha Mansell, Isabelle O’Brien, Megan Cosgrove and the sales and marketing team. Thank you to my copyeditor Alice Grundy for her brilliant intuition and care. Thank you to Clara Finlay and Daren Leung. To Simon Paterson and Bookhouse, and Griffin Press. And to Josh Durham for a cover that captures exactly what this little book is about.
Kelly: You made my dreams come true. I continue to be amazed by your dedication and passion for what you do.
Grace: You helped me see this book for what it was. For that and so much more I am eternally grateful.
Alex: This book is as much yours as it is mine. Thank you for the life we have together. I love you.