They need to break through her surface. To make a fracture, smash the glass. To find that power, vestigial perhaps, salvaged certainly. To make it their own.
She laughs, and they are gone.
Someone running in the steam of evening. The ocean to one side below rocks, a roaring darkness. Rain comes hot and sordid. The feet against cement, the jar in knees and ankles, the strain in the heart. The body takes this punishment, the breath a sharp pleasure. Up slope, a tropic mess of weeds against the wet stone, the smells of salt spray, sweat, sewage, rotten fish, cooking sausages, the feeble lights of windows, each footfall the risk of a slip. The runner presses between the bodies and crests a set of stairs in the cliff. They feel his head twist to the side as the foam crashes against stone, an argument between elements. Then he stops, comes up against another body, almost at collision point.
The first reaction is the body’s rage against its broken rhythm, the interrupted breath. His chest heaves. Then the imposition of the other man’s eyes, startlingly close.
A young man’s eyes. The runner can’t help looking into them. Something flashes through his body, like a memory. It does not belong to him. Each wet breath enters his lungs like a blade. They feel the pressure as the body fights them. The gaze so close to being seen. They know him.
Adam.
He shifts to the left, and the other shifts with him.
He doesn’t see them.
They hold his gaze, but he doesn’t see them.
If this man could just say his name.
The runner moves to the right side now, away from the ocean, trying to get past, and Adam moves with him. He moves a third time, stepping to the left again, and Adam mirrors him. Their eyes stay locked, unblinking, caught in the dance. Rumbles of frustration travel through him. They want to scream.
They can’t get out.
The runner reaches out and touches Adam on the shoulder. It’s intimate, almost fraternal. Maybe touch will wake him, let them cross over. If they could move, if they could choose, they would slide down that arm and enter him right now. But he only applies a slight pressure, and pushes him aside like a curtain. And Adam, meek, steps out of reach.
They want him to wait. They want him. There is a hunger in them that he might answer. They want to land like the rain on his skin, soak through to empty him.
But the runner takes in air and shifts his weight. The shock is his. He takes it in, rejects it, rejects the moment, flees the scene. Absorbed in the satisfaction of his strength. His feet pound the cement until the rain gets in his eyes and his breath hurts and he has to stop. A jut of rock, a metal handrail slick with water. They are his prisoner. He grips it, warm steam on him, the stitch the centre of attention, the scent of iron. In the feet, in the breath, they remember. They want to go back.
He turns, but much too late. Adam has long gone.
Moonlight bounces up from the water below. The dark Pacific hurls itself against the rock. Did he see them here, did they catch him in that sidestep dance? Did he recognise them? There was something there. They want this man to go after him, to turn and give chase. They try to give him their hunger.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t go back, but can’t go forward either.
He’s their prisoner now, caught between: his face cold, his whole body shaking like he’s seen a ghost.
SYDNEY
The rain arrived in force that afternoon. Adam stood at his window, admiring the elemental strength of it. Watching these storm drains overflow was the closest he would come to water views, he thought, and decided he would save this line for the party tomorrow. He had lived in Sydney all his life, but always in the west. The beach was too far away to visit easily. The house he grew up in looked out at its own back fence, a patch of corrugated iron that receded behind the sculptural native plants that his mother preferred to cultivate: semi-formal presentations of banksias and kangaroo paws, four huge gymea lilies, their flower sceptres faintly obscene. As a kid the stretch of lawn had been a stage for his sister’s antics, watched from inside, but later he reversed the scene so that their dining table was the set, the audience out on the lawn. Adam had pictured his father standing there in all weather, looking sadly in at them.
He was glad to be free of the place.
From this room he looked down over other fences, narrow streets. The gutters were full enough to carry cargo now, and bits of garbage floated down the temporary creeks. Wet like this, the city was a living thing. Steam rose from the asphalt, silvered where the light had slipped through clouds. If he went out in it, the rain would be warm on his skin. He rubbed at the goosebumps on his upper arms.
The tropics were slowly soaking south, they said, the storms increasing, but something was being done, or would be, before it got much worse. They would fix things in Copenhagen next month, or it would all fall apart. For now the tropical air was pleasant. Moss grew along the wooden fence below his window, soaking up the thunderstorm. The patches of black mould on his ceiling were flourishing. The proliferation of life would go on, mutate with the coming corruptions. In the kitchen, he could hear Marita’s voice raised, her tone stressed, and it broke his concentration. He went downstairs, paused at the bottom and turned towards the voice, but went no further.
‘Hong Kong rain,’ said Yun in the hallway behind him. Their sweet voice startled him; he felt it like a touch at the back of his neck, felt the spring in his muscle as he turned to face them. The house was dim, so he could not see them clearly. Wet hair and the scent of rain still clung to their body. Adam breathed it in. He was glad when the rain increased its volume, became deafening. He wasn’t sure that he could speak. It was impossible that the sky could hold so much water. It felt abnormal. He had never been to Hong Kong and couldn’t remember if Yun had mentioned living there or even visiting. But, yes, he would agree when he could speak again: this felt foreign.
They were moving towards him in the dark. In a moment he would open his mouth.
Yun spoke first. ‘Can I get by?’ Their tone was light, ironic.
He was glad the dim house had hidden his expression. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, and turned for the kitchen. The house was so stuffy when it was closed up like this, the air mostly water, unhealthy, full of spores. His throat felt tight and sore. He was having some kind of a reaction.
Marita had her hand on the window. ‘Everything is going to be wet,’ she was saying. ‘Wet and wrecked.’
‘Don’t stress,’ said Kate, looking up from her toast. ‘Says it’s going to clear by morning.’
‘I don’t think so. Look at it!’
Adam put the glass down in the sink with the others, turned and leaned against the cupboard. Yun hung back, stood beside Marita at the window. The kitchen felt too small in this light. He watched their faces respond, hers with the usual intensity, theirs with calm detachment. Adam kept his eyes safely on Marita, the dark eyebrows pushed together, the curled hair pulled tightly back. He had not been in favour of the party, really, but now found that he was looking forward to its being ruined. They all needed something to bring them together, some kind of break. The probability of catastrophe was exciting.
‘It might clear,’ Yun said. Their face was angled away from him, but their voice was serious and steady. The bones beneath the skin barely softened by flesh, the expression lost. So feminine in the rain’s light that Adam had a moment of confusion.
They turned and saw him watching, held his gaze, almost smiling. The angle of their face changed again, changed everything. His whole body realigned itself. It was hard to remember that they didn’t know, that they’d never woken, the way they looked at him now.
But they must know. The invitation was there, the door left open.
‘Maybe we should cancel,’ said Adam.
Marita turned on him, furious. ‘We can’t just stop living,’ she said. Of course she was not only stressed about the weather. He had for
gotten the girl again, the predator, and now whatever he thought of saying to calm her down felt mean and small. So Adam simply nodded, and waited for someone else to speak.
‘Men like that want us all to be afraid,’ Kate said quietly behind him.
And in the foreground Yun sighed, a slow exhale somewhere between exhaustion and defiance. The light shifted, seemed darker than before. ‘Of course,’ they said. ‘It’s obvious. We must go on as if this never happens.’
And so Adam went on, Adam surrendered. Awake again before first light, he went downstairs and saw that he had left a glass of water on the bottom step. He stooped to pick it up before anyone else noticed. The water had a dull surface, dusty, as though it had been left there for days. When he had only sat there a few short hours ago, in the dark. He sniffed, but it smelled of nothing.
He took the glass to the kitchen, rinsed it, went back to bed and waited for the day. He may have slept. When he saw the sky between the trees, it had floated to its usual aloof height. The trees shook and the quiet was spiked by the grating, high-volume greetings of cockatoos.
Adam thought about swimming. The lap pool in the park would be perfect today. He looked in a milk crate for his swimming shorts, then lifted his shirt in front of the mirror and examined his pale belly. He would sneak out quietly, he decided, but near the front door he stopped at Yun’s room. Their door was ajar, and he was careful not to push it against the pile of books that he had already reset once in silence. He knocked lightly.
Their face appeared in the gap, eyes faintly troubled.
‘What.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Were you studying?’
‘Reading,’ they said. The door showed him one eye, one cheek, one nostril. A corner of a mouth.
He held his shorts up in a fist. ‘Going for a swim,’ he said, and had to clear his throat. ‘Want to come?’
They glanced out of frame for a long moment, then returned to him. A slight uptick at that corner. ‘Swimming . . .’ they said, as if the word was new to them. ‘I don’t think so.’
They released the door, pressed past him, made for the kitchen. Adam clutched his shorts, exposed. He saw Kate standing on the stairs with her swim bag in one hand; she must have been listening. ‘Come on, let’s all go,’ she said. It might have been an order; Yun sighed, leaned against the other door.
‘Mazzie!’ Yun called. It was the name Marita’s high school friends called her. He hadn’t noticed they had started using it.
They walked in formation, Marita and Yun in hushed conversation, Adam and Kate following, not speaking. The pool was busy, a rush of bodies, languid, bounding; Adam did not know where to look. He went alone to the men’s change room, which was empty. When he emerged Kate went straight to the water, slipped into the fast lane. The others lay on the grass, and Adam joined them, Yun in the middle, stretched fully clothed but barefoot in the shade. Marita was reading the weekend edition of the newspaper she hated, paging through it, pointing out the flaws in stories she disagreed with. Adam barely noticed what she was saying, listened to her voice change pitch. She was flipping through the pages looking for any mention of the vigil, but the news cycle seemed to have moved on.
He turned onto his back, but his exposed stomach glowed white, so he rolled onto his side, facing Yun. He could watch them, safe behind his sunglasses. The straight dark hair that thinned out at the neck, becoming delicate.
‘Seriously,’ Marita said. ‘It’s like she never existed.’
‘No,’ Yun answered, an odd humour in their voice. The back of the t-shirt had a small version of the print on the front, a crop of Hokusai’s Great Wave. Its menace was lost in miniature. He could see the tag through the white t-shirt’s fabric, and wondered if it irritated their skin.
‘I mean, are they even looking for the guy that did it?’ She let go of the paper, rested her head on her brown arms and sighed.
‘It could have been anyone,’ said Yun, shifting on their elbows. One hip against the earth.
‘Any man,’ she muttered.
Adam felt that he should participate. ‘At least there was something about it,’ he said. ‘In lots of countries it wouldn’t get reported at all.’ He couldn’t see Marita’s reaction. Nobody said anything. The sun was beginning to feel uncomfortably warm on his skin. He wished someone would change the subject.
‘We should have gone to the beach,’ said Marita.
‘By the time the bus gets there, there’s no point,’ Adam said.
‘I forget there are beaches here,’ Yun said. ‘You know?’
Adam frowned into the sun as Marita sat up. ‘I grew up closer than this,’ she said. ‘I used to go all the time, we still had to drive, though. You didn’t go when you were a kid?’
‘Once, in a place near Beijing. My father’s parents took me, I don’t know why. I hardly knew them. I had to spend that summer there. Must have been after the divorce, a year or two before they sent me here, and I was growing into this –’ Yun tugged at their left hand with their right, as if to pull the skin away like a cloak. ‘You know,’ they said, though Adam didn’t. He watched the skin spring back into place.
‘I was scared, so my grandfather held my hand and walked me to the water. It frightened me – the grey water. I thought it was the edge of the world. But I wanted it. I liked how little I weighed.’
Adam didn’t speak. He heard Marita make an empathetic clicking sound.
‘When I got out I couldn’t see my grandparents anywhere. There were a lot of people, I was afraid I wouldn’t recognise them, or that they might have left me there. But they were waiting. She dried me with a rough towel, and he bought me a kite. I don’t remember flying it. I must have left it behind. I only really learned to swim here, in high school.’ Yun leaned forward and sat holding their knees to their chest, facing the pool.
‘I like the water now,’ they said, with no trace of longing.
Adam wanted to speak, but then Kate appeared from the pool and stood dripping chlorinated water on his exposed calves. He sat up and moved his legs away. ‘Aren’t any of you getting in?’ she demanded.
‘I will in a minute,’ said Adam. She was already returning to the water. He watched her stand at the edge, her arms raised overhead, one leg bent, and slip into the deep. Then he pressed his hands against the damp grass to rise.
‘Coming?’
Yun didn’t answer. Maybe they hadn’t heard him. He wanted the water now more than anything else, the feeling of its density, that clean pressure.
Adam stepped in gingerly, the pool cold after rain but too crowded to linger at its edge. Some nearby children were tossing a ball to each other with an unnecessary amount of splashing. He bobbed beneath the dividers to the slow lane, and worked his way through six laps, stopping at each end to recover his breath. He was sure he had been fitter last season. He looked for Kate in the fast lane, but the costumes and water were anonymising; she could have been any of the trim sporty women zooming past.
When he looked across to the grass, Marita and Yun were deep in conversation. He watched the soles of their feet move as they laughed. If they wouldn’t swim he felt sorry for them. There was something about being buoyed by water that soothed the body’s sense of itself, that took away for a time the responsibilities of gravity. He managed another two laps of breaststroke, trying to think only of what his body was doing. He focused on the patterns. He looked up in time to see Yun standing poised at the far end; he recognised the t-shirt, its arched threat restored. They dived perfectly. Adam’s arms were tired. He thought of standing on the beach with his father, letting the waves bury their feet in the sand, wriggling deeper until he could barely step away. The grip of earth. He let himself sink to the bottom of the chest-deep water for a moment, held his breath and let the surface close over him. Then a huge pair of shoulders barrelled towards him, and he had to rise fast to get out of the way. When he
looked for Yun again he had lost them.
In the change-room mirror he could see himself in twenty years, looking like his father with these sacks under his dark eyes and this expression of faded anxiety grown in, a look of having been bothered by something, not deeply but long. His hair even seemed a little thinner in this light; he wondered if he would be balding by then. Marriage, kids, a job all waited in line, and then the premature end. He did not want to think about any of it. No matter; he had plenty of time.
He looked younger after he showered, his lips soft and eyes rimmed red from the chlorine, though the horizontal lines in his forehead did not disappear completely. He felt the men behind him changing, their eyes moving from body to body, making comparisons, or assessing attractions. The notorious male gaze. As he dressed he kept his back to them, lifted the towel from his hips to cover his shoulders, which felt strong from the pool. He enjoyed the feeling of being seen.
When he came out to rejoin his housemates, Yun was standing outside the women’s change room, holding three bags. Their shirt was dry.
‘You weren’t swimming?’ he asked. He didn’t want to sound accusing.
‘Didn’t feel like it,’ they said, their eyes fixed on the change-room door.
Adam covered his expression in the towel, though his hair was dry enough already. It must have been someone else he had seen. At that distance it was a mistake anyone could make, but it disturbed him.
Marita was throwing a plastic tablecloth over the rickety outside table. She disappeared for a moment, then reappeared dragging a bag of cut firewood she must have bought from the service station at the corner. The fire wouldn’t be needed for warmth. Though the muddy yard was walled on three sides by other houses, the sun had reached the cement, which had mostly dried. She began to wipe the seats with an old towel, staining it brown. She leaned on a stack of milk crates they had gathered for extra seating. Someone had sorted them by colour.
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