The Glass Kingdom

by Chris Flynn

  She’s a great dancer. Moves like a snake. And you love that ink on her back. A three-masted sailing ship being pulled under the waves by a kraken. Look at the detail. Seagulls gliding overhead, waiting to scavenge the spoils when the boat sinks, to pluck out eyeballs from floating corpses. Sailors tumbling from the rigging, some of them in the water already, their eyes wide and filled with terror. The tentacles of the beast curl up over her right shoulder as she dances, like it’s climbing her body, trying to infiltrate the garden scene on her chest.

  Roses. Hundreds of tiny roses in bloom covering her breasts, and below is a wrought-iron gate, open just a fraction to suggest there might be a way to climb right inside her belly, to discover her secrets, to see what’s in there.

  Yours is weak by comparison. A slobbering hound, the symbol of the Bluedog. It hurt like fuck. Made you feel soft. Gave you a newfound respect for your old mum, though. She could handle pain. She had to, putting up with Francis all those years. You wonder what they’re doing now, right this minute. The old man’s probably dozing in the chair, a half-drunk tinnie spilled on the rug next to his trailing arm. Evalisse will be watching some reality cooking show. Masterchef. My Kitchen Rules. She loves that shit. Has a thing for George Calombaris. Never understood her taste in men.

  You suppose Steph will be the one who has to tell them. Better her than Huw. Too much bad blood between him and Francis.

  Shit, now look where you are. The Channel Ten studio, stood behind a stove and a sink and a bunch of expensive chopping boards. You’re wearing an orange jumpsuit and your ankles are chained together. There’s a hard-looking con at the bench in front of you, and another glowering behind. It’s year five of a forty stretch and you’ve picked up a few skills in the kitchen at Barwon. All you have to do is make it to the end of the season and you’re home free—pardoned, the chance to write your own cookbook and maybe host a show on SBS. Carny Food with Benjamin Wallace, winner of Cook for Your Life!

  Mikey’s grinning from ear to fucken ear. He loves that you’re on his show, that you can see how well he’s done, that he was right all along. He’s a star now, a genuine media phenomenon. You’re in his shadow. It’s embarrassing. But if that’s what it takes to get out of there, you’ll play along.

  It gets worse. You’re in the audience at the Grammys. He’s just won album of the year. The Kingdom of the Blind has gone platinum. Fifty Cent hands him the trophy. They embrace like old friends. Mikey slaps him on the back and they share a private joke. The crowd is on its feet. They want to hear the new single, the duet with Pharrell. Miley Cyrus is weeping in the corner, a broken woman, her career in ruins. She is pregnant with Mikey’s child. No one pays her much attention.

  He thanks you in his speech.

  If it weren’t for my homeboy Corporal Wallace, I wouldn’t be here today, and that’s the triple truth, dawg. Peace out.

  He raises two fingers in a victory salute. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  Steph is waiting for you when you get out of prison and the publicity tour for the show is over. Being inside her is like pulling on the jeans you’ve owned for the better part of a decade. You know exactly where to go and how much wiggle room there will be. After all those years, sex between you isn’t thrilling or romantic or weird anymore—it’s intense catch-up fucking, throughout which you are bemused by the madness and strangeness of it all.

  All that time you spent waiting for your life to begin. The years of expectation, of yearning for your real friends to arrive, the ones who would take your hand and lead you away to a better life, the one you were supposed to have, they just slipped away somehow. And now you’re older, you’re working in a restaurant, quietly serving up dishes to customers who remember you from that crazy cooking show where everyone died but you. They know you used to be a meth dealer, and a carny, and a soldier, and a boy who watched his mother swallow swords—but it’s a past that is so dim and distant it feels like someone else’s, or a tall tale you once heard whispered on sideshow alley.

  Bad habits, casual opinions, your reluctance to engage with the world—it’s a human fire sale at your place. Everything must go. You decide to spend whatever precious time you have left in this world bidding farewell to a man who, in truth, you never liked very much anyway. His departure will not be lamented.

  You and Steph rent a little place on the Sunshine Coast, in Mooloolaba maybe. You have an old Holden in the garage that needs some work. A legion of bottle tops is scattered around the floor. Every time you have to untangle the Gordian knot of extension cords, you promise yourself that you will replace them with a single, brightly coloured ten-metre one from Kmart. You collect snow domes from op shops. You have ones from Denver, Helsinki, Aberdeen.

  Steph tolerates your fondness for vintage Playboy. Your favourite centrefold is Michele, playmate of the month, April 1978. She looks down on you from above the workbench, keeping watch as you work on the engine of the Holden. You know her body about as well as you do Steph’s. She wears knee-length white stockings. A silk robe is swept back behind her hips. She is holding a parasol. Her eyelashes are heavy with mascara and if you look closely, and you have, there is a hint of make-up on her abdomen just above the thick blonde bush.

  Michele was born in 1957 and enjoys making love on the beach, but only if it’s warm out. She likes to hear the rhythm of the waves breaking against the shore and claims roller rinks are the best places to meet guys. She purports to be a direct descendant of Sir Francis Bacon. You wonder if he too was a prude in high school and loved to have his breasts kissed.

  You imagine standing on the beach, watching as Michele strides out into the morning surf. She is in her sixties now, but still looks strong. Her skin is weathered and tough. The tendons in her neck strain with the chill of the waves. Her hands come up to the sun and she is momentarily framed on the horizon before thrusting beneath the water, stroking her way out effortlessly into the cobalt sea. If she gets into difficulties, there is no one to save her but you, and you are hardly qualified. You never were much of a swimmer. You always preferred the mountains. Getting up above everything. Looking down. Taking the high ground.

  You wonder if there are answers to your questions out there at the bottom of the ocean, or in that former playmate’s life, between the creases of her mottled skin. You want to ask Michele how she raised her children, if she taught them to swim and deejay and abseil, if their father showed them how to roller skate. Did they ever see the photos? Did they roll their eyes and say, ‘Nice umbrella, Mum’?

  The buttons of your jeans come open easily, though as you hop from one foot to the other awkwardly pulling them over your ankles, you see Steph waiting impatiently for you in bed, shaking her head at your clumsy antics. Be right with you, baby.

  The cold of the water sucks the air out of you. You hold what little breath you have left until you see pinpricks of light, a galaxy swirling within your eyelids. You drift down, deeper, away from the surface until you are among the stars. You call the playmate’s name.

  Wait for me, Michele. Wait.

  Somewhere an asteroid strikes the planet and, in an instant, you are vaporised and your atoms are rocketed high into the mesosphere. The man you were is now nothing more than a Triceratops, or maybe an Iguanodon. Either way, it’s sayonara, big guy. You are megafauna, cast in the air by the impact, dashed into countless microscopic pieces.

  The air is thin up there. It is hard to breathe. Everything looks so tiny. The night has passed. The horizon is ablaze with colour and light. The clouds part as the chopper begins its descent to the base and, finally, you turn and feel the sun’s warmth on your face.

  Props to my editor David Winter for the fully sick remixes, publicists Jane Novak and Stephanie Speight for the media big-ups, and Chong for his beast cover skillz. Shout out to the posse at Arts Victoria for the chedda.

  To the crew who put up with me and inspired me while I worked on this: David Astle, Jordan Bass, Nihal Bhagwandas, James Bradley, Sophie Cu
nningham, Jenny Niven, Diego Patiño, Nick Earls, James Franco, Robert Skinner, Afsaneh Knight, Andy Murdoch, Kent MacCarter, Mischa Merz, John Hunter, Jess Ho, George and Bonita at Zoologie, Brad Dunn, Yu-Ann Chen, Jason Crombie, Ianthe Brautigan, Tony Birch, Nadia Saccardo, Robert F. Coleman, Mel Cranenburgh, Bethanie Blanchard, Angela Meyer, Lisa Dempster, Jemma Birrell, Martin Shaw, Michael Williams, Simon Abrahams, Michael Cathcart, Sarah L’Estrange, Estelle Tang, and Zora Sanders: Peace.

  To the Destiny’s Child of literature: Josephine Rowe, Claire Bidwell Smith, and Toni Jordan, whose books Tarcutta Wake, The Rules of Inheritance, and Nine Days taught me how to be a better writer: Holla!

  To my family: Ernie and Liz, Julie and Sammy, Aunt Margaret and cousin Alison, Alun and Jenny, Barney and Alayna, and Tom: Can you kick it? Yes, you can.

  To Eirian, whose propensity to sing filthy gangster-rap lyrics while she works would make Mikey proud.

  Kendrick Lamar

  good kid, m.A.A.d city

  Frank Ocean

  Channel ORANGE

  Azealia Banks

  1991

  Broke with Expensive Taste

  A$AP Rocky

  LONG.LIVE.A$AP

  N.A.S.A.

  The Spirit of Apollo

  RL Grime

  High Beams

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TEXT PUBLISHING

  CHRIS FLYNN’S DEBUT NOVEL

  A Tiger in Eden

  Belfast hard man Billy Montgomery is on

  the run from the Northern Ireland police.

  Where better to hide out than

  Thailand’s backpacker trail?

  ‘Poignant…a cracking first novel.’ mX

  ‘Unmissable.’ Courier Mail