by Rodney Hall
‘So what are they. Going to do. To me. That hasn’t. Already been done?’
‘Just listen to me for a change. What with your Google searches—don’t worry, they’ve got you tracked—plus that outburst on television. I’m telling you. Eyebrows are raised.’ He jingles his keys and pats the fruit basket regretfully. He considers what he has just said and wonders for a moment if the Minister would accept this as fulfilling his word to her. ‘I can’t stress too much that they want you to stop. You’ve no idea how big this is. Refuse—and they’ll shut you down, one way or another. You take their money, their equipment and their services . . . you need to demonstrate goodwill. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘Fuck off. Zac.’ And this works.
Once the senator has gone Adam balances his weight in the CSAAD. He grasps the wall rail with both hands, palms helplessly padded and lacking sufficient fingers. While he waits for the ceiling to stop bucking and warping the towel slips and Bridget is confronted by the last familiar folded valley of his former body, the dense embeddedness and sudden virility she knows so well.
‘Fact is,’ Adam mumbles with some embarrassment as she covers him. ‘That silly bastard. Already has his nose stuck. Up the government’s. Arse.’
‘Would this be the same government you’re suggesting I rely on when I punt you back into their care?’
Adam hears and doesn’t hear.
‘Poor guy. He is. Perhaps the world’s. Stupidest high flyer.’
Out through the bathroom window a rag of blue sky unfolds. He recognizes his opportunity.
‘If. He thinks I mean. Trouble. He’s right. I’m not going to. Let this rest.’ He coughs and then waits for his pulse to settle. ‘All the more reason. For you to. Give me away. As a bad job. Seriously darling.’
‘And find another man?’ And Bridget utters a little shriek like torn tin.
‘Why not? For instance. Ryan may be. A catch.’
She hears, but dismisses it, while choosing a fresh wrap for him.
‘I thought you’d write Ryan off as a wanker.’
Adam is amused.
‘You know me. Too well.’
‘Used to.’
‘Point taken. Same here. Ar. I used to know. Me too. Anyhow in the end. Ryan delivered. Didn’t he.’
‘That’s because he’s ambitious.’
A few minutes elapse before he decides on his next move. There is tenderness in the swift conclusion of his argument.
‘And he might. Be quite good. Ar. In bed.’
‘Now you’re guessing.’ She brushes it off. Her heart sinks. She could seize on this. She might, at least, confess to Ryan. And feel better for it. But no sooner is the opportunity there than it’s gone. She has missed her cue.
‘It seems like. Ar. An age since Zac . . .’ he begins without the context of what he has in mind because, in fact, he is remembering a long-gone day when he and she borrowed Zac’s boat to go sailing across the sparkling bay. They were so young and it was her first time on the water. The kick of the prow, the sting of spray, wind pockets ruffling the surface that reflected the brilliant sky, canvas a tight drum responsive to his strength, rudder digging a channel as they arced away from the pier. Momentarily overwhelmed by her shining eyes and the bloom of sun on her skin, he put the question: he asked her to marry him. Laughing with surprise, she said yes. And the 505 flew.
Finally, when your finger is on the trigger, it is your finger. And your brain in charge. Free will can be tough. You forgive yourself and get on with life—or you don’t.
*
Having promised to collect Linda from school, Bridget is there. Of course she is. In her parked car she waits for children to emerge. She thinks about the absent mother, the remarkable young woman who seems to have found strength to leave, at a snap of her fingers, trusting Yao not to let her down. Curious that that wasn’t a reason for staying with him instead. Lost in thought she doesn’t hear the bell.
Next thing, Linda calls to her. The teacher waves. And Linda opens the passenger door, appropriating her place on the front seat. She settles her skirt.
‘Is this your car?’
‘No, I stole it.’
‘Smooth.’ Linda tries out the upholstery, fingertips tracing the stitched edges.
‘Make sure your belt is done up, for when the police chase us.’
‘Is that right?’
As they accelerate away from the kerb the entranced child spreads her wings.
‘I can fly.’
The road streaks under and away. As a vehicle of dreams the car does not disappoint. Fresh air can be made to rush in by pushing a button. Her piping voice finds the pitch of the motor and she sings along with it. Even a brief sprinkling of rain gets wiped away, cancelled and re-cancelled in glittering arcs. Linda has been in cars before, but not often—and never in the front. The mysterious feet of the next-door woman work at some pedals, so perhaps she has to walk on them for the car to know when to stop and when to start. And, just like people, it waits for the red light.
‘You’ve got long hair,’ she accuses.
Bridget smiles across at her and then turns this smile toward the prospect of the road ahead, a tiny glint of victory in her eye. ‘Nearly there.’
‘Daddy’s at home.’
‘Not yet, darling. He works late today. That’s why I’m here. But you can come and talk to Adam and draw a picture for him.’
The picture shapes itself as a car.
And in time, as promised, Yao makes his appearance, bringing with him the breezy freshness of added earnings. He gathers up Linda’s crayons to be packed away in her school bag. Wordlessly the child waves to Bridget with a tiny star hand even while skipping down the ramp, her father in tow.
Now look at him. Driven by lone-dog doggedness, his whole body contorted by the effort of one step succeeding another as the Contraption walks him out through the porch door and on to the verandah. His courage and his stupendous humility astound and fascinate her.
‘Adam,’ she protests tenderly.
He does not hear. He is out and about, declaring his captivity public, converting his ruin into a prodigy. This lock-hipped progress back into the world acquires the dignity of ritual, a meditation, a dance. He composes the sliced peaches of his face to form a mouth. Put together Picasso-style. His spare-parts throat gets working. Words are let loose.
‘I reckon our. Ramp thing needs. Ar. Checking out.’
‘Good,’ she says.
And it gets left at that.
Adam conducts a spot check of the exo-skeleton’s clamps. With everything in readiness and himself lashed to the mast he stalks to the brink. Yao’s voice calls, ‘Ready when you are.’ A stand of stately clouds floats past across the sky. Car tyres on the road dwindle to a whisper. Crickets take a break from grinding the world to dust. Adam grins a crooked version of his morning smile.
‘So let’s go. Ar. Proof’s in the. Pudding.’
They do this together, Yao shuffling backwards, arms outstretched to prevent an accident. The Contraption tilts down the first slope (towards the road), articulated joints emitting a faint hum of calculations as they register the angle and placement of non-slip feet. Adam, suspended among the struts, revolves to face the lower slope (towards the house), slow as an ancient tune on a flute. So, the future unravels till eventually the two friends reach street level.
‘Now you can make your getaway.’
‘A plan already in. The pipeline.’
Bridget rests her arms on the rail to watch them embark on the ascent back to the house. Oh, it’s agonizingly slow, this miracle, as Adam negotiates the hazards of liberty. Though whether he notices her or not she cannot tell. At last, as he rises, the implications of the ramp are clear: benefits more psychological than actual. Reaching the top and propped on Promethean legs he includes her.
She laughs lightly, falsely, to hide her feelings. Admiration crowds her to the verge of tears. And yet—and yet—there is a tiny troubled resentment, too. As if she has become dependent on his dependence. Now he leans against her for support, so close she hears the tiny crackling protests of his repaired skin. And Yao is close too, the three of them in a bunch. Sensing something of a giveaway in this closeness, Bridget insists on the guiltless present.
‘Yao,’ she says, ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘No worries,’ he replies with no hint that he might be troubled by the memory of a tiny glimmer glimpsed under the trees the other night. The glow of a mobile. Plus a faint face (hers) unforgettably revealed.
Bridget gets busy with the breakfast things. ‘How about your parents?’ she asks, presenting her bent back, because there are implications for her. And, with Adam present, this should surely be a safe subject.
‘They don’t understand why my girlfriend left me. And never will. Chinese do not like to be alone, we’re not used to it.’
‘She left, but. On the bright side. You know your swimmers. Work.’
‘God help me, they work.’
‘I never. Knew about. Mine.’
Moments elapse, wounded moments numbered by drumbeats.
Adam is struck by the strangeness of friendship as a phenomenon: the fascinating discovery of different experiences and non-binding trust. The loose satisfactions of separate lives. Relationships seem simple by comparison.
‘When. Ar. When we married.’ (Bridget trembles with anticipation.) ‘I was just an. Idiot having fun. Ar. With no idea. A good-for-nothing kid. Gambling. Spewing and speeding. Bridget wasn’t ever. She wasn’t. Ever the problem.’
Tears start up in her eyes.
Yao sees and comes to her rescue. ‘My father was at Tiananmen when the tanks arrived,’ he tells them as if this was a story he had already begun and promised to finish. ‘Pretty scary stuff. For a bright young communist from Datong it was enough to shake his faith. He’s only just begun to make sense of it and see the whole disaster as part of the progress to capitalism. If, in fact, it is progress.’
‘Maybe we’ll. Meet him some. Day.’
‘He’s a survivor too, so he’ll understand you.’
Yao places a quieting hand on Adam’s shoulder. They register the contact—each man on his own terms—firm, neutral, completely without distaste.
‘All I do with. My wasted life is to. Waste Bridget’s.’
‘Feeling housebound, mate?’
‘Feeling. Fucked.’
Bridget comes and goes, the fabric of her dress delicately brushing her calves with whispers they both hear.
Eventually Adam replies at a tangent.
‘I’ve begun to. See my brain as.’ He hunts for words. ‘As a sort of web of. Ar. Electric impulses.’ He taps his temple, almost. ‘The mystery of connec. Tivity.’ He coughs and takes a while to recover. ‘Just one spark can. Change the world.’
‘Now you’re into philosophy.’
‘Ah, mate. Mate. Philosophy’s beyond me.’
Someone’s grandfather is explaining about a book he owned as a child—the cotton-stitch spine, the aged smell of the paper, print stamped into the page—a boys’ adventure story . . . the dream re-dreams itself. The book is more immediate. Adam follows the plot with wonder. Someone is kidnapped. And someone else eavesdrops. He thinks the old man should be warned. He wakes to find a stranger in attendance. There’s an actual child, too, sitting up at the table drawing. Linda. Both heads turn towards him as he speaks across the missing minutes that, for all he can tell, might have been hours.
At length he says, ‘Out there the. Enemy are paying. The price.’
‘The price for what, though?’ Yao asks.
‘Ignorance. Theirs and ours.’
‘By enemy you mean the Iraqis?’
‘By enemy I mean. Humans.’
Yao grows very serious. ‘My language is like that, too, one image suggesting others.’
Silence holds them with reassuring warmth. Adam eases his armpits.
‘You’re a good. Listener.’
‘Because you’re a good talker.’
‘Fucked voice, though.’
‘Fucked voice.’
Yao reaches for a crayon that has fallen to the floor and hands it back to Linda, who takes it from him without losing concentration on her drawing.
‘So, perhaps I could download some music for you or something?’
‘My past as. A headphone junkie’s. Finished,’ Adam gasps. ‘I love Rock ’n’. Roll. Or the memories.’
‘War damage?’
Yao, while attentive to Adam, watches his little girl at work.
‘Left ear. Out of action. Imbalance has a. Weird effect. Like being seasick. A bird with. One wing.’
‘Daddy.’ From the absorption of blue, Linda speaks now she needs to break the mood she has created. ‘Daddy.’
‘What is it, darling?’
‘Are we having eggs for dinner?’
Such utter aloneness is beyond measure. Death leans against him to unsettle his equilibrium, threatening to skittle him, its footfalls muffled, threatening to stomp down and crush him. He must call on every ounce of strength to fend off its hippopotamus shoulder, like pushing against an ancient bulging wall. He finds himself eye to eye with the destroyer who stares at him from the sinkhole of nightmare—a glittering pool, mute and lethal—gigantic iris contracting, seeking but still not quite finding . . . its vague engrossed omnipotent rage vast and sublime. He trips and falls.
The clever Contraption adjusts, clicking in position, to save him.
Bridget lies on her back for the sake of staring at the ceiling.
Washing-up done, she joined him to watch two episodes of the series The Newsroom. Afterwards he sucked messily at a joint—gift from Yao—and the rigmarole of bathroom and bed played out its tricks and highlights. Routine. She is still staring at the ceiling when she wakes. All in the dark. She listens. Nothing but cogs locking teeth in the night. Her rebellious spirit stirs and heaves. She is young, too young to be a full-time carer. Hunger, gnawing her gut, dares her to name it. Secrecy asphyxiates her. She recoils from what she might become. Once up and about, she stands naked at the window because (you never can tell) Yao might take turns as the stalker! She witnesses herself there. In pride and shame she displays her body for the first fingers of daylight to caress. But they seem to reach past her, wasting themselves on glorifying her legitimate possessions with delicately traced outlines.
Right now she could walk out through the front door and away down the ramp. Yet she doesn’t. It’s nothing you could single out by way of explanation. Just that the simplest, most straightforward imperatives baffle her. She can’t be sure whether there’s any such thing as right behaviour or not. Ought she to have run away already? Is there a timetable for extrications? She draws back from naming Yao as culprit. Yao, after all, will never be hers. Not just because little Linda is going to see to that, but because she herself cannot allow it . . . or she would have no room left for Adam.
This is this.
Barefoot, she turns on the spot. The polished floor utters a tiny squeak. Her need decides for her. She leaves her packed bags where they are. She goes just as she is. Once downstairs she pauses only long enough to check the cubist details of the prison she is determined to escape. But she is careful not to look at him. That would be too risky. On the table near the door her big glass bowl gleams, a gift she gave herself when he moved out, now delicately luminous and seeming to float. Deep in its transparent belly the dull silver of her car key. The meaning of this key confirms the rightness of what she has begun. She takes the bowl in her hands, surprised by so much weight and coolness, the fixed transparency a product of the furnace
. . . plus breath from the scarred lungs of a glassblower. Second thoughts. She peers in, enclosed by reflections. And when she holds it up to the open window a fine blade of light flashes round the full ellipse. At this moment the new day tilts down, dawning across the world of gardens and brick walls. Half-blinded she lifts her gaze.
What she sees out there causes her to freeze.
Adam’s back—so close he is within reach—rigid as stone. Propped in his black scaffold he teeters at the brink of the slope. There is triumph in the angle of his unsupported head. Has he erected himself just to show off? Her throat contracts. Is it possible he can manage, with the tremendous resilience of a self-made survivor, to walk the Contraption all the way down to the road, alone and without help, out from the daybreak-shadowed verandah and into a blaze of trumpets? Apparently, yes.
Step by step, miraculous as articulated marble, he descends to the landing where he rotates with the poise of a planet. Now, facing her way, he shoots her an unsurprised glance. With mixed pride and misery she acknowledges the stupendous banality of his success. And she’s not the only watcher. Yao, on his side of the hedge, raises both fists in salute. His voice, sounding supernaturally clear, links them by deferring to her at the open door.
‘What do you say, Bridget?’
‘Brilliant,’ she calls out, suddenly flooded with gladness and eager to share their triumph.
Adam locks the frame. His weight depending on the elbow rests, he twists at the waist to acknowledge them. ‘A skateboard. Would be quicker.’
Bridget, barefoot, the loose shift under her coat caressing her body delicately (and again both men notice), swiftly darts down to be with him.
‘Vanessa,’ she jokes as she helps guide him back, ‘is going to have to eat her hat.’
*
Every Thursday Ryan swims routinely at 6:30 in the morning. Few others use the Olympic pool at this hour. Given a choice of lanes he can train in isolation. Today three girls independently churn back and forth. No two strokes matching—though each is regular as a machine—the neutral background of random syncopation soothes him. They don’t interrupt his concentration, they help. He paces himself, settling in, adding his long-distance rhythm to the mix. He has perfection down pat. Surging and sleek. His muscular shoulders sheathed in transparency. All unobserved and ticking off the laps, he becomes what he makes of himself. Tactical and tireless. He knows the game. Life. He has learned to live with the hollowness of having no innate sense of himself. Relying on others to show him and then constructing his responses to please them. Bridget being a case in point. Tumble-turning at six hundred metres he is visited by a great idea. Suggested by Adam Griffiths. The opportunity of a lifetime. Because that story could be developed into something. Kicked off by the explosive accusation that it might have been friendly fire. Confronting the camera. Wrecked flesh and the furious eyes of a ghost. A classic. Handled right, this could open up into a scoop. Big enough to embarrass the government. Absolutely. And they’ve had it coming. Well, no one is going to argue against injuries on that scale. A link to the Chilcot report in the UK. The work has already been done. A full-length investigation. Top visuals. Destroyed hero, beautiful young wife. Essential to include her—plus her suspicions of a cover-up—and the long delay before she was notified. Years, apparently. Another perfect tumble turn. Building his sprint finish. The prospect appeals. Confirmed by social media. Already questions are being put at the highest level, with management pressured by the minister. It’s all there. Ready for him to step into the spotlight and galvanize public opinion. His ratings through the roof. A masterstroke waiting to happen. He can do it. He can trigger protests. Yes, and upset the balance of power. Even to bringing down the whole caboodle. So that’s the potential. Now he needs to tackle the detail.