Into Bones like Oil

by Kaaron Warren

  In the breakfast room, the clock ticked gently in the silence.

  Dora sat in her corner breakfast spot. She knew she could skip the ordeal, eat muesli bars in her room, but there was something compelling about watching the daily parade.

  Freesia came in before the others. Dora thought perhaps she’d been out all night.

  “How’d you sleep?” Freesia asked her. “Everyone has a good night’s sleep here. It’s like being on board a ship, you know, rocking rocking rocking and you can hear the waves if you listen closely.” She picked up untoasted bread, tore off the crusts and ate them, then balled the center into a sphere and popped that into her mouth like a pill.

  “I think it’s the sound coming through the speakers,” Dora said. It was like the sea gently lapping at the shore. White noise? Pink noise? She wasn’t sure which. “I slept well, but I felt like people were watching me.”

  “They were,” Freesia whispered, then laughed, a high screech that set Dora’s nerves on end. “I think of myself as a free spirit. Get it? Free Spirit . . . Free-Sia.”

  Dora thought that all this meant was she’d never finished school, had never held a job, certainly not one you had to apply for. Maybe fruit picking? A job where you just had to show up. She might be able to manage that.

  “What’s your born name?” Larry asked her. He and Roy had entered and headed directly to the food.

  “Nah,” Freesia said.

  “Go on. What? Beryl? Fucken Ethel?”

  “Ruth,” she said finally, to shut him up.

  “Jeeze,” Roy said. “You lot should spend less time making fun of someone’s name and more time figuring out how we’ll get the coin for a bottle of booze.”

  “We could get a bottle of crap red,” Freesia said. “I heard this trick that if you tip a bit of OJ into it, it tastes like good shit, not shit shit.”

  A new woman entered the room. Dora had heard shuffling in the night-time, and heavy breathing, but no arrival.

  This woman was in her twenties. She was morbidly obese, dressed in clothing too big for her. It looked like she was wearing a bed sheet. Her hair was wet and her face shiny. Fresh from the shower, perhaps? Was she in there before Dora? But she didn’t look refreshed.

  Roy looked up from arranging cereal boxes. “Julia is awake! You look marvelous,” he said. He’d combed his hair and was wearing a suit, looked almost ordinary.

  Julia lifted her arms and twirled herself around. She had fold after fold of skin. She said, “Do I look skinnier? Come on, you bastard. I haven’t eaten for a week. I must be skinnier.”

  “Breakfast?” Roy said. “Grapefruit followed by a shit ton of bacon?”

  Quiet laughter around the room. “It’s cereal day, Roy,” Larry said. “Don’t be a mongrel.”

  Julia sat down next to another new addition, a silver-haired man at the other corner table.

  “Seriously, Dr. Adams,” Julia said to him. “I was asleep for a week?”

  “How do you feel?” the doctor said. He stood and washed his hands at the nearby basin.

  “My throat is really sore. And I’m starving.”

  “Did you sleep well?”

  “I don’t know. I guess? But I don’t feel like I was asleep for that long.”

  “This method has that effect in a way. It replicates the sense of coma, liked we talked about. Like your brother.”

  “Yeah but. He was in that coma for seven years.”

  “You can’t sleep that long. Maybe one day we’ll be able to replicate it,” the doctor said.

  “A whole week not having to think,” she said. “It was beautiful. Like my brother said. You live your dream life. That’s hard to wake up from.” She stood up again and stretched. The mantelpiece clock ticked into the silence. “He went to sleep again,” she said. “He hated being awake. Cried all the time. He felt so far behind all his friends. He had nothing, not even a high school diploma. He said he thought he had it sorted, but he woke up and he’d done nothing. Not that I’ve done a lot. But I got my beauty diploma.”

  “I got my hairdressing one!” Dora said. “I actually got a few awards for haircutting even.”

  “We should open a shop! Anyway. I missed him. Miss him. I’m eating enough for the two of us.” She chuckled here, wanting Dora to laugh along, laugh at the fat girl joking about herself, but Dora didn’t.

  “I wish I could sleep,” Dora said. “Forget for a while.”

  “They can help you.”

  The alarm went off at eight a.m., signaling the end of breakfast.

  “Session’s over,” someone said.

  Dora would learn that someone said that every day, and even those who hadn’t been through therapy understood what it meant.

  •••

  Dora washed her underwear and T-shirts in the shower, then took them into the small backyard hoping to dry them in the sun. Roy was there (he seemed to be everywhere), sitting on a milk crate, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. On the washing line was money. A dozen or more damp notes.

  Dora started hanging her clothes up. There were no clothespins, so she draped them over the lines.

  “You probably need to wait here till they dry,” Roy said. “People’ll pinch anything.”

  Dora stood there, not knowing what to do.

  “Pull up a pew,” he said, indicating another milk crate. She couldn’t think of anything worse, but sat without speaking. “Your upstairs neighbor is no longer with us. Should be quieter now,” he said. “Until I go hunting for a new tenant.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  He said, “Every time some mongrel moves out I have to replace the fittings. These bastards even took the mirror. They’re all cunts. You’ll find out.”

  “I don’t have a mirror in my room so don’t think I pinched it when I leave.” She was always careful to stay within the law.

  “Nah, yours got pinched already. We might find one for you down at the wreck site.”

  “Isn’t that called looting?” she said.

  They both looked at the money, drying on the line.

  “You’d be amazed what people leave behind here. Under the mattresses, mostly. I’m just doing a bit of money laundering.”

  Dora knew she was supposed to laugh, but the best she could manage was a smile. “So what happened to my neighbor? I thought they were quieter last night.”

  “Offed themselves. But some of these people are already dead before they’re dead, if you know what I mean.”

  “Who cleans that up? You?”

  “Muggins, as they say. I do most of it around here. I do the breakfast, but Freesia helps sometimes. We do have a cleaner comes in every now and then. Washes the linen and other stuff. I used to do it myself but had complaints, didn’t I, Freesia?

  The door slammed, Freesia with her arms full of wet washing. “Jeez, Roy. Get this shit off the line.”

  She hung out her underwear, all of it sexy, see-though, very small.

  “Look at this sexy bitch,” Roy said. “Ay? Check her out. Hippy on the outside, hooker on the inside.”

  “Fuck off, Roy. If you don’t take this shit off I’m pinching it and spending it. You’re a fucken limp-dicked loser so fuck off.”

  Roy’s shoulders slumped. He stood up and plucked the notes off the line. “You can leave whenever you want to,” he said. Freesia kissed him on the cheek.

  “You know you love me,” she said. They watched Roy slink away, the notes shoved in his pockets.

  “Come upstairs for a cuppa?” Freesia said to Dora. “I’m up the top there. It’s like a crow’s nest. Glass ceilings. Like sleeping under the stars.”

  “Maybe later,” Dora said.

  “You watch that Roy. I’m good at making him feel loved. It’s my only talent, making men feel loved. You know? Respected. It doesn’t work on men who are beloved or re
spected, only men like Roy.”

  Dora didn’t know how Freesia managed it. Roy really was repulsive-looking, the smell of his cologne strong enough, evil enough, to singe nose hairs.

  “He’s an arsehole like all men. You watch it when he comes for the rent. He’ll offer ‘in kind’ and he doesn’t mean sex.”

  “What does he mean?”

  “He’ll want you to go to sleep for a day or two. And you’ll talk. You’ll talk non-stop, the voice of some shitty arsehole dead drowned sailor, and you’ll wake up feeling like hell.”

  “I may not have the rent money.”

  “Then you might have to go to sleep for a day or two.”

  “That’s . . . weird.”

  “Nobody lives here who wasn’t born weird,” Freesia said. “Haven’t you noticed? This place is full of shipwreck stories. Most of us are fucken wrecks.”

  “Luke calls it Shitwreck House!”

  “Yeah, well. Luke is a funny bastard, isn’t he?” Freesia glared at her, lit a cigarette, and literally turned her back.

  Dora decided she didn’t mind if her things were stolen. She didn’t want to stay there any longer. But then Freesia drifted off to sleep in the sun, the cigarette still between her fingers. Dora took it and stamped it out.

  Freesia started to murmur.

  In the sunshine there were shadows. Dora thought she could see the shape of a tall person, tall and thin, bending over, talking into Freesia’s ear.

  “Told him twice. Told him. Told him twice. Told him,” Freesia said. Her voice was low and scratchy, rough.

  Roy appeared in the yard. “What’s she saying?”

  “Listen yourself,” Dora said. She couldn’t bear to hear the voice anymore.

  She headed back to her room, but the idea of sitting there in the dark on this sunny day made her feel pathetic, so she decided to go for a walk instead.

  It was quiet. Along the corridor leading to the front entrance were old faded photographs in dented and marred mismatched frames. There were photos of a group of young cyclists, standing proudly beside their bikes. There were cups and tankards on shelves and china cats, dozens of them, all damaged in one way or another.

  The mantelpiece clock ticked so loudly she could hear it halfway up the hallway and she wondered if anyone had serviced it in the last few decades.

  Outside, she saw Roy up ahead, stumbling with purpose, and she followed him to the shipwreck site. He carried a hook over his shoulder.

  Even in daylight the beach was hard to get to, although she could see the path Roy walked. There was a section of shoreline covered in clothing. Roy would tell her later that somehow this happened day by day, clothing would wash in and gather in piles. The day was warm but not hot. Still she could see a shimmering miasma over the beach, like the road on a summer’s day.

  In the daytime there was a clarity about the wreckage that laid out what had happened. Even now there were deep gouges in the ground, which was littered with metal and wood. Very little of value. Luke had told her Roy bought a lot of his stuff from a shipbreaking town in India: a satellite mast, porthole glass, lino, security doors, coffee machines, armchairs, crockery, fridges, anchors, ropes, cupboards, mirrors, tables, plates, jam jars, colanders, fire exit signs. The lights he had out the front of the building, which looked welcoming but did little to warn what was ahead. Roy said he dived for and found the treasures himself; Luke’s version seemed more likely.

  She watched as Roy headed back up the path. She saw images attached to him like limpets, shapes of people—a young boy, an older girl. He dragged another along with his hook, a half-naked man, she thought. And yet another he held out his hand to, and he walked along that way as if leading someone to a pleasant picnic spot.

  Dora wasn’t seeing what she was seeing, she knew that. She was hungry, hadn’t eaten since breakfast and then it was only cereal. Her vision was blurred. He was just an ugly man, and those shapes she saw? The people she imagined? That was only the sea spray around him, his own rising heat, perhaps.

  She walked home via the supermarket, stopping to pick up some more cheese crackers and a packet of lollies. She had a sweet tooth and couldn’t eat lollies when the girls were around because they’d want one, or they’d steal one from the cupboard when she wasn’t looking and she’d have to discipline them, which she hated doing.

  She could see where her room was, on the corner of the house. From the outside it looked as if the door could open, but she knew it was nailed shut. The ground in front of the door was over-run with high grass.

  When she reached her room she found a note under the door.

  Am home from work. Come up and see me when you get home. I have vodka and chips. Luke.

  She showered first. The floor and shower were dry this time, far more pleasant. While she showered she thought of things she could talk to Luke about. How easily she was pleased; how she wanted very little because she had very little and was everyone like that? And about the beach and what lay on it and Roy and his books and his rent and about what Freesia had said, about sleeping and ghosts.

  She’d ask him all of that. It would mean they’d have something to talk about.

  She checked her phone but no one had called.

  She went out the back to get her washing and some of it was gone. Her own fault. No one to blame but herself.

  •••

  Luke wore a nice blue shirt and ironed jeans. She felt old and ugly in her own clothes, wished she had work clothes like he had, something respectable that would make her look as if she was capable of holding down a job.

  “How’d you sleep, gorgeous?” he said, and he kissed her gently on the side of the mouth. He smelled very faintly of sweat but also of aftershave, not like Roy’s, like something that cost actual money.

  “How was work?” she asked, because you did. She didn’t know what he did for a living and he didn’t tell her.

  “Yeah, not bad. Better to be home, though.”

  “Yeah, it’s the little things, isn’t it?” she said, and she told him about her thoughts, about how the little things could make her happy.

  “I don’t get why you live here, though! You should be able to afford somewhere else.”

  “I like it here because there are needy women who ask for little,” he said, straight-faced until tears pricked her eyes. “Kidding! It’s just an interesting place to live. That’s all.”

  “I went down to the beach today.” This was the next topic she’d rehearsed. “It was so weird. There are all these clothes washed up. And metal bits and other things. From the shipwreck?”

  “Most of that was pinched long ago. Not all of them died in the wreck, you know. Some were murdered on the beach fighting for treasure.”

  “What sort of treasure?”

  “They thought there might be gold. You know, people’s wedding rings, that kind of thing. Whatever there was, it’s long gone.”

  He poured them a drink and opened a packet of chips. “Looters are arseholes. You know they swoop in after a natural disaster. Flood or fire or cyclone. Army has to step in half the time. Shipwreck stealing is bad enough but after disasters? They’re pinching from a person’s home or shop, you know? So when that person finally gets back, they’ve lost even more than they should have.”

  “Would you call Roy a looter?”

  Luke said, “I guess he would say it’s ‘spoils of war.’ No one else will look after you. You need to look out for yourself and your family.”

  This was the moment when ordinary people would ask about family—his and hers, who are they, where are they, what do your kids do, where did you meet your wife, your husband—but no. These two glanced at each other and neither asked the questions. Both understood family was not to be discussed. Many at the rooming house would be the same. Family is past; there is only the present.

  “Anyway, there’s
a bit of a thing Saturday. Our version of a party. We’re all going. They call it a Ship Wreck.”

  “Oh, I probably won’t.”

  “You should come. Bring something. Booze is best. You can come with me.”

  “Freesia may not like that.”

  “Freesia . . . Freesia will fuck anything with a dick and then think she’s married to it. One of those.”

  Then he tugged her on to the bed and made love to her. Tender man, tender and gentle and it made her cry to feel that way although she buried her face in the pillow so he couldn’t see.

  •••

  He fell asleep quickly again, with his solid arm across her. She needed the toilet but was anxious about going. She didn’t want to leave this warm bed and go back to her hole in the wall. She didn’t want to wake him. She didn’t want to prop his door open in case someone came in.

  In the end she had to get up and go. She’d go back to her own bed, curl up there in the damp sheets (why weren’t his damp?) and try to sleep. She pushed open the bathroom door and stepped outside.

  “There you are.”

  Dora jumped a meter in the air.

  “Jeezus.”

  Roy stood there, beside the door, in the shadows.

  “Freesia’s falling asleep. Do you want to come and listen? You can hear for yourself what a pack of cunts they are.”

  “Listen to what?”

  “The ghosts talk. I saw you on the cliff. You know what I dragged back. Come listen to them.” He tried to take her hand but she resisted. “I feel like I can talk to you. You understand me.”

  They climbed the narrow stairs up to Freesia’s room and met Dr. Adams on his way down. The doctor squeezed past Dora, face towards her, pressing against her. He had an erection, she was sure.