Jaswinda laughed, short and loud. ‘And who will take over my cases?’
‘I’ll find someone.’
Her eyes were swollen and her nostrils chapped. ‘If there was anyone else I wouldn’t already be doing the work of two.’
Graeme shrugged. ‘We’ll cope.’
‘I doubt it.’ Jaswinda rinsed her spoon and placed it on the draining tray. Threw the paper sugar packet in the bin under the sink.
‘Everybody is concerned about you, Jaswinda.’
‘I know.’ She held her coffee mug in front of her with both hands. ‘But it is good for me to come to work. Routine is comforting, I find. Or maybe just distracting. Whatever, I’d rather be here than at home.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ she said, walking past him and out of the room.
Late that night, he thought of Jaswinda as he sat in front of the news nursing a mug of weak tea. He admired her strength and thought her approach to grief wise, but mostly he envied her. He longed for a specific grief and for something to do to distract from it.
‘War should always be a last resort,’ the pubescent talking head on the TV said, as if he knew anything about it, as if war was a stand-off between a recalcitrant child and a kind father at the end of his tether, rather than something that happened because the child has no food and the father has no hope and there is no kindness or tether or attention being paid.
Footage showed French soldiers leaning against a wire fence on what the voiceover said was the Chad–Sudan border but which, with its bitumen ground cover and hulking gunmetal sheds, could have been any airbase in the world. The scene changed and Graeme had the familiar sensation of seeing his memories played back in front of him: the endless procession of Somalis using the dry river bed as a track, their faces wrapped in grimy rags to protect against the dusty air.
Graeme’s nostrils twitched at the remembered stench of diarrhoea and decaying animals. The roar of a Land-Cruiser, the screaming of women and grunts of militia men drowned out the reporter’s voice and he was again watching from the passenger seat of the supply truck as the wadi turned from dry land to a stream and then the stream to an overflowing river. He heard the rushing water and the roaring engines louder and closer and the screaming women and his driver saying three months; felt the ache of not moving while radio messages told of infections taking hold and bodies piling up.
He closed his eyes and let the sounds and smells work their way over and through him. He counted his breaths until the only smell was stale cigarette smoke, the only sound a British girl talking about topless photos of a minor royal. He finished his tea and watched the end of the news and went to bed.
He was woken around 3 am by the sound of his flatmates. He lay in the dark listening as it went on and on. What did they think they were doing? To what possible end all that screwing and shouting?
6.
Adam woke feeling like he’d aged thirty years overnight. He remembered climbing a fence, falling on his butt, hitting his head. He remembered swimming in a lake or possibly a pool, getting chased by a dog, screwing clumsily on wet grass. He knew none of these things happened in a dream, because Eugenie had not been there.
He used to wake up like this often. A room full of stale air, a stranger’s limbs stuck to his skin, pain behind his eyes, stomach swirling with bile. Occasionally he’d stick with a stranger long enough that she wasn’t one anymore, and every few months he’d stop drinking for a week or two and think about going back to college and getting his teaching certificate. Several times he took off to the furthest country he could afford to fly to, but wherever he was he woke the same way, with the same feeling of helpless boredom.
And then a few days after his thirtieth birthday, he’d shared a laugh with the new mailroom girl and, caught by her accent and swishy blonde ponytail, he asked her to lunch. They ate takeaway Greek salad on a park bench and by the end of the hour agreed that this was very strange. This being the unspoken but unquestionable fact that they would be together. It was too obvious to need saying. It would have been like saying I have skin and a heart that beats.
‘Aaaadam, I’m starved.’ Katie hovered above him, her hair falling in greasy clumps around her shiny face.
He covered his nose from her rotten breath, closed his eyes to her cracked lips. She straddled him and squeezed his ribs between her thighs. ‘Come on, I’m going to die if I don’t eat. Get up. Get up, get upgetupgetupgetup.’
He kept his hand over his face. She thumped his chest and began to bounce. The movement started a wave of nausea in him. It moved up from his guts and broke in his throat. The inside of his mouth tasted as rancid as her breath smelt.
‘Cut it out. I feel sick.’
Bounce. Bounce. Thump. Stomach acid and disgust swirled in him.
‘I mean it, Katie. Just stop it.’
‘Or what? You’ll go back to Eugenie?’
He grabbed at her, caught her arms, threw her off. He heard the oomph as she hit the floor.
‘Fuck you, arsehole. That hurt!’ She stood and rubbed her arm. ‘What’s your problem? Aren’t I allowed to say her name? Eugenie, Eugenie, Eugenie.’
‘How do you know . . . ?’ Adam pressed both hands to his stomach, covering the crowns, taking breaths.
‘You told me, idiot. Last night, you told me about your wife, how you loved her right away.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Yeah, probably because I was sucking you off at the time. Distracting, right? So? Are you going to tell me about her? Did she leave you or what? Is she still in America? Are you going back? I mean, this –’, she waved her arm about, pointing to the bed, the bottles, the two of them. ‘Are you getting even or moving on?’
He rolled upright, stood, pulled on his underpants and jeans, then sat and let his swimming head settle.
‘Adam! Talk! You’re going back to her, aren’t you? Aren’t you?’
‘She’s dead,’ he told her, hearing for the first time the blandness of the word. It conveyed none of the disorienting horror of it all. There were other words for that. Ungainly, tangled words he knew would forever trip off his tongue. Histopathologic. Debulking. Laparotomy. Salpingo-oophorectomy. Recurrent–Epithelial. Metastasis.
Katie was talking. She was sorry. It was too much to take.
‘I’ve gotta go.’ He slid into his flip-flops and put on a shirt on his way out the door.
Before they came here, Eugenie told him Sydney was just like San Francisco. The light, she told him, the air, the water, the bridge, the vibe. But it was winter when they arrived and the light, the air, the water, the bridge and most certainly the vibe were grey. Not grey like the cottony fog that hangs over the bay in the morning and lifts to reveal the sparkling colour beneath. Sydney was grey like ashes, like arsenic.
He buried her in her hometown of Newcastle on a sweltering morning in the first week of December and spent the rest of the month and most of his savings in a hotel behind Central station. He slept, watched TV and ate potato chips and candy from a machine in the foyer, kept the curtains closed and the air-conditioning on and paid no attention to the digital clock beside the bed. When he began to smell sour he washed and changed his clothes. His beard grew in and his stomach turned to flab while his legs and arms became thin.
Sky News told him that outside of his dim, cool room bushfires raged and men stabbed each other through the guts. Adam became convinced that the land itself was murderous. Its thick, ashy air swallowed whole towns and incited men to violence. Its parched earth starved sheep and ruined farmers and smothered the dead with layers of dust. If he opened his window he heard screams, sirens, screeching brakes. He dug his travel documents out of the bottom of Eugenie’s backpack and discovered that his visa had expired weeks ago and, if he stayed in this hotel room, his cash would be gone in a fortnight.
In the first week of January, he went searching the hung-over, streamer and beer bottle strewn city for cheaper accommodation. He told himself that
moving into the Broadway flat was the first step in getting his life back together, but now walking those same streets, he saw he had only sunk further into the pit that had opened beneath him when Eugenie died.
Looking up out of it for the first time in months, he saw the light had changed overhead. It wasn’t grey now; it was white. It hurt to focus on anything. He kept his eyes half-shut and moved from bright spot to bright spot without relief. Every office block had been constructed out of reflective glass and sparkling granite. He felt he had stumbled onto the set of a sci-fi movie. He looked for shade or shadows but saw only light reflecting light. Women wearing yellow, citrus orange and white, white, white swarmed around him. Men in dark suits fired lethal rays as they flipped open their silver phones.
Adam tried to imagine Eugenie walking these streets. He saw her skin crack and peel, her pale hair sparking and burning like straw.
He squeezed his eyes closed but the white light assaulted him in sharp tiny bursts. He opened them again and spotted the entrance to Town Hall station. He lurched towards the darkness, bumping against hot skin and angry voices until he was on the escalator. Asian teenagers clustered on the steps below him and he blinked into their black hair until his vision cleared.
Underground, Sydney was cool and dim. He had expected to see trains and tracks but instead there were hole-in-the-wall stores selling fresh juice or coffee, offering boot repair or suit cleaning. He followed the teenagers for several minutes through the subterranean maze, past newsstands, ice-cream stalls, coffee counters, a rare coin collector, a pharmacy, a florist. They stopped at an internet café and Adam followed them, then stood dazed in the doorway. His mother didn’t know about Eugenie. Breaking the news in an email would be cruel, but so too would be her reaction. The pain would still be his.
He left the café and re-entered the maze, choosing direction instinctively, taking an escalator to a sub-level of this underground metropolis, buying a Coke at McDonald’s, listening to the thrum of invisible trains, the murmur of traffic, wondering how he had been in Sydney so long without knowing about this other city thriving below.
Returning to the flat and the girl seemed impossible. Stepping back out onto that bright, loud Sydney street was unthinkable. Sitting in the middle of a cavernous food-court sipping flat, watery Coke was manageable. He wondered if Eugenie had ever been here, ever sat in this space, at this pen-knife scarred table. The thought he would ask her occurred simultaneously with the thought that he wouldn’t.
Since she died his brain had been performing this neat trick of delivering up concurrent contradictory thoughts. Like it knew he couldn’t keep going unless he believed she was coming back but that he wouldn’t find a way to keep going if he didn’t admit she wasn’t. He guessed most sane people thought that way about their own deaths: you will never die so live as though the future matters/you could drop dead any minute so live for the now.
Adam knew he used to think that way himself, but now death had stopped being abstract. It had become personal and in the past tense; not a future event to hold off as long as possible, but a recent trauma his wife had endured. To worry about the inevitability of death was ridiculous. Death had already happened.
But he could imagine that it hadn’t, that he could charge up into the cruel light and push through the crowds, peering into shady doorways and through shop windows, grabbing shoulders and spinning blonde-haired strangers until he found her, red-faced and wide-eyed and sweating and she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and pressed her forehead to his and smiled while she kissed his smile and said I got so lost. Then, then, he would carry her down here to the tiled, fluorescent-lit cave and place her on this orange plastic seat so she could feel the carved vows of love on the back of her thighs and he would buy her a Coke and they would tell each other all the things that had happened and all the silly fears they had had while they were apart.
7.
Katie’s heart sped up when Adam walked through the front door. She’d been waiting on the couch, her hair brushed and lips painted pink, a cask of red wine and two glasses on the table in front of her.
‘I don’t want to talk,’ he said and walked past without even glancing in her direction.
She listened to his feet pound along the hallway and flinched when she heard the lock of his door slide closed. She sat in the living room, trying not to breathe too loudly, trying to interpret the sounds from his room. Itching, she shuffled down the hall, leant against his door, imagined him leaning against the other side, wanting her to call out to him, wanting her to hold him and kiss his face and tell him it would all be fine.
Then she heard what sounded like a burbling snore and stepped back. ‘Fuck you, then.’
Dom was sitting exactly as he had been the last time Katie had been here: slumped in his corner booth, hair hanging over his face.
‘Anyway, I was thinking,’ he said, as if she’d just returned from the dunny. ‘Sitting here and getting pissed all the time.’ He tapped the bottle in front of him. ‘What’s the point?’
She took a swig of her beer. ‘So do something else if you don’t like it.’
‘Like what? Put on a suit, sit behind a desk, pound away at a keyboard all day?’ His hands reared up in front of her face, fingers twitching.
‘Or play the piano,’ said Katie, but he was too busy typing on his invisible, absurdly long keyboard to notice. ‘I’m thinking of getting a job, actually. In a clothes shop. I’d be good at it, I reckon. Helping people choose outfits, telling them how marvellous they look. Wrapping up their purchases in tissue paper with a big ribbon.’
Dom snorted. ‘Bowing and scraping to materialistic bastards all day. Selling doctors’ wives five-hundred-buck T-shirts made by starving kids in the Third World.’
‘Yep, exactly that, Dom. Exactly. Jesus.’
‘Just telling it like it is, girl.’
‘You being an expert on how it is.’
He slid forward, resting his tilted-back head on the top of the bench seat. ‘You’re young. You’ll learn.’
‘What will I learn?’
Dom’s eyes were closed and his mouth open. Katie leant in and put her ear close to his mouth; his breath came soft and slow. The angle of his neck was all wrong; she wished he would shift his body and let his head fall on her shoulder. She finished her beer and his wine, the side of her body pressed hopefully against his.
When she got home, Adam was in her bed. ‘Sorry,’ he said, rolling over to face the wall. ‘The sun comes in my window in the afternoon. I couldn’t sleep.’
‘It’s fine. Sun’s down now, though. If you want to go back.’ She held her breath, waiting, but he didn’t move or answer and, after a minute or so, she lay down on the bed, careful not to touch him.
‘I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what it feels like.’
He swallowed loudly. ‘It feels unreal.’
‘Was it sudden?’
‘No. Yes. I mean, it’s why we came here. She said she’d feel better at home and we both pretended that meant she’d get better once we were here. Even in the hospice . . . I mean, it’s crazy. I remember thinking, Jesus, thirty-five years old and I never realised there were whole buildings set aside for people waiting to die. I remember her saying “a good rest is just what I need” and this nurse giving me this sad smile, like we were united in pity over Genie’s delusion. I remember thinking “Fuck you, it might be true,” and then realised that every second person in this place is thinking the same thing. I remember thinking all that and still – still – being surprised when it happened.’
‘Katherine. I’ve been calling since I got in from work. Is your phone broken?’
Katie imagined Gran sitting in her navy work shirt and the pink pyjama shorts she changed into as soon as she got home. She would be holding a can of Diet Coke, looking out the side window onto the council park, shaking her head at the take-away chicken containers a
nd cigarette packets abandoned on the single graffiti-splattered bench. Tapping the cane phone table in frustration as the phone rang out again and again.
‘Battery went flat without me noticing.’
‘Is everything okay there? How’s Graeme working out?’
‘Oh, fine.’ Katie propped the phone under her chin so she could refill her glass. The wine dribbled out, reminding her that this was the last cask and she was out of cash again. ‘Hardly know he’s here.’
‘And Adam?’
‘He’s asleep,’ Katie said. ‘He sleeps a lot.’
‘Does he?’
‘Mmm. Hey, did you know he’s a widower?’
‘What? No.’
‘His wife was called Eugenie. It’s so sad. I can hardly stand it.’
‘Oh, Katherine, darling. You’re not getting involved with him, are you?’
‘Jesus. I just told you the man’s wife died.’
‘And you sound very upset about it.’
‘Yes, I am. Because it’s upsetting.’ Katie slugged some wine. ‘Don’t you think it’s upsetting, Gran?’
‘Of course it is . . . Listen, darling, I’m sending you a brochure I picked up about a childcare course running at the TAFE up the road.’
‘Childcare, Gran? Really?’
‘Well, why not? You’re energetic and –’
‘And unstable and irresponsible, not to mention –’
‘You’re talking yourself out of it before you’ve even given the idea a chance.’
‘But being responsible for children, Gran!’
Gran sighed. ‘Just have a read of it, okay?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And Katherine, the American . . .’
‘What about him?’
‘Just try not to . . . Try not to take on all his problems. Try not to get too . . . invested.’
‘Right.’ Katie wished she had a temazapam to go with the last of the wine. She wished she hadn’t wasted all that money on drinks that Adam either threw up or slept off. She wished she hadn’t answered the phone or told Gran about Eugenie or been so transparent.
Smoke in the Room Page 6