The conversation had left Katie feeling jittery, fragmented. The guilt of her teenage years – the suspicion that she was coddling herself, cultivating this wacky but fragile persona just to avoid facing up to reality – returned.
She searched the flat for forgotten supplies of alcohol, smoked her last cigarette, kissed and poked Adam who refused to wake. She sat on the floor under the window and counted her breaths the way she’d once been taught, but Adam’s snoring interrupted her rhythm. She tried counting his breaths but every one made her teeth clench tighter.
A noise from the living room sent a caffeine bullet to her heart. Her speeding heart sent a memo to her brain which told her legs to move. She ran towards the noise without pausing to consider if running away from it would be wiser.
It was just the TV, switched on by the man she had forgotten lived here.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Sorry, is it too loud?’
‘No, no. I just . . . I forgot there was anyone else here and I heard it go on and . . .’ She was stunned by the shrill, bright, stinking room. Her heart raced. A film of sweat prickled her forehead. She steadied herself with two hands on the back of the armchair. Calm down, everything’s fine she told herself, told her body, but even as the words formed in her brain, she doubted them. Why believe that her mind knew better than her body? This mind that told her body to speed towards danger, told her a television was a threat.
‘Late night news. Bit of a habit. But I don’t have to. If it’s going to disturb you, I mean.’
‘I’m not disturbed.’ Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Nothing’s the matter. An ordinary conversation. Breathe and speak. Air in, words out. ‘I don’t know how you can stand to watch that stuff. Depresses the hell out of me.’
‘It can be depressing, yes. But there’s always some good news in there, too. A new cancer treatment or the end of capital punishment somewhere or other.’ He spoke softly and slowly, the way you would to an orphaned child carrying a gun. ‘Even the bad things are often signs of progress. War, for example. Now when one country invades another the rest of the world pays attention. Protests or observes, holds soldiers and their commanders to account. There are rules of engagement. Geneva conventions. Once upon a time leaders would just sweep into neighbouring lands and massacre every man, woman and child in their way.’
Her eyes stung and although she concentrated on in and out she could not get her breathing right. She couldn’t remember how this man came to be here.
‘I mean, as brutal as the world can seem, when you take an historical perspective it really isn’t so bad. Think of all the dreadful things that used to be tolerated: human sacrifice, gladiatorial circuses, crucifixion, witch burning, the torture of religious dissenters –’
‘Yes,’ Katie said. The man said something else, but she was already at the front door, then in the hallway, the door closed behind her, her hand on her belly, her body shaking. She ran to the lift and pressed the call button. She stood and listened, thought she could hear the mechanical whirr starting up far below.
‘Fuck this.’ She ran to the end of the hallway and threw open the fire door. For a second she stood trapped in silent darkness, then the automatic light flickered on and she could see the slanted roof overhead, the scratched grey paint of the railing, the concrete steps spiralling down. She leant over the edge of the railing and blinked into the tunnel of light at the checked tiles of the front lobby fourteen floors below. All she needed to do was put one foot down on the first step and then the next down after it. She practised in her head, but kept tripping and falling. She reached backwards and found the wall, slid down it, breathed in, breathed out. The concrete was cold beneath her bare feet. She sat there until her chest was still and her head was clear.
It had been a while since her body had misfired like that, sending her into an adrenaline spin. She thought of the missed doctor’s appointment, the unfilled prescription. It was too soon for that to have made a difference, she was sure. This was a random instance and she had breathed her way through it on her own, without alcohol or restraints or phone calls to Gran. She had panicked and recovered and best of all she knew that was what had happened which meant she was much better than before. It meant she was fine.
She got up and went back through the fire door and down the hallway and into her flat which was quiet and warm and safe.
8.
The flat’s kitchen reminded Graeme of a kitchen of his childhood, the one in Parramatta that belonged, as far as he could recall, to his second foster family, the one with the father who got up at first light and made fried eggs and vegemite toast for whoever was able to drag themself out of bed in time. That kitchen table was, like this one, an aluminium and plastic fold-out with matching moulded plastic chairs, and it was positioned, like this one, so that the sun came from the window over the sink and warmed the back of your neck. Every morning felt like the first day of a camping trip back then.
One Wednesday, as he sat in his usual chair drinking his coffee, the American came and sat down across from him. He was wearing jeans, but no shirt. His eyes were bloodshot and his skin blotchy. Up close and in the sunlight, Graeme saw that Adam was at least a decade older than he’d first guessed. Considerably older than the girl who looked to be barely out of her teens.
‘Hey, you’re up early,’ Adam said, stretching his arms over his head, cracking his neck from side to side.
‘I’m always up at this time. I start work at eight-thirty.’
‘Oh, right. Yeah.’ Adam yawned.
‘Late night?’
‘Yeah.’ He ran his hands over his stubble. ‘I hope we didn’t disturb you.’
‘Last night? No, no. Barely heard you.’
‘Oh, good. Good. I mean, Katie can be . . . kind of loud.’ He chuckled unconvincingly. ‘When she drinks, you know.’
Graeme took a sip of coffee. ‘Yes.’
‘But I’m putting a stop to all that, anyway.’
‘To her drinking?’
‘No, I mean . . . The late nights and all that. I need to get out there. Look for a job.’
Graeme put the last morsel of toast in his mouth, chewed and swallowed, while Adam tapped the table with his fingertips and bit his lip.
‘What kind of job?’ Graeme asked.
‘I don’t care. I just need to earn some cash, get out of here, you know?’ He jerked his head towards the door. ‘What about you? What are your plans?’
‘For what?’
‘Getting out of here.’
Graeme took a large gulp of coffee. Stinging heat ran up the back of his throat and into his nostrils. He coughed and squeezed the bridge of his nose. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and Adam flicked the word away. ‘I don’t have any plans. I’m happy here. It’s close to work, cheap.’
‘Really?’ Adam leant forward. ‘I just assumed you were in the same situation as me. Not exactly the same, obviously. But here for the same basic reason, you know – to get your shit together.’
Graeme shrugged. ‘I suppose my shit is already together.’
‘Well,’ Adam said. ‘Well, that’s great.’ He tapped the table three times and stood up. ‘I’ve never known anyone who had his shit together.’ He laughed, shook his head. ‘Good for you. I’ll see you later, man.’
Graeme finished his coffee, rinsed and dried his plate and coffee mug. He went to his bedroom to collect his briefcase; on the way back up the hall, he paused outside Katie’s room, his ear close to the door. He thought he heard that awful phrase – shit together – repeated, and cringed.
He walked to work fast. What’s so funny about having it together? he thought, as he handed a twenty-dollar note to the red-tracksuited junkie outside the liquor store. What would a man like that know, anyway? Spoiled, lazy, tattooed nomad, killing time with whatever young chicky he could talk into bed, living as though AIDS and child armies and dignity-smashing poverty did not exist.
Graeme knew these things existed. His final, total acceptance of them was what allowed him
to be so settled, to have his shit so very together. He knew and accepted also, that past horrors could decay your insides without your knowledge, that you could wake one day and find that an axe you thought was securely stowed has fallen and split your mind clear in two. He accepted this, too. He accepted it all and that was why he had moved into the flat and why he had no intention of leaving.
9.
Adam’s newest discovery, which now sat alongside the harsh light, the wetness of the heat and the existence of a secret underground civilisation on the list of things Eugenie had not told him about Sydney, was the flies. It was like a biblical plague had descended, so loud you heard them buzzing from across a busy road, so fat you felt heavier when they landed on the top of your head. He hadn’t noticed them until this week, but whether that was because there weren’t any or because he had spent the daylight hours in darkened rooms, he did not know. They were worse, according to Katie, when it was humid, and this week had been so humid that Adam was soaked before he’d finished towelling off after a cold shower.
‘However hot it gets,’ Katie said, ‘Sydney flies aren’t so bad.’ In the time it took her to say it Adam brushed three from his face. ‘In Darwin, they’re like a rippling wall you have to sort of swat your way through.’ She showed him how it was done, stomping and swiping with her arms, fighting the air, as though it were a jungle.
‘I’ll be sure to never go to Darwin, then.’
‘Don’t let me put you off. I’m only guessing about the flies. I’ve never been near the place. I’ve never been anywhere.’
They pushed on through the flies and the heat. They were going ‘shopping’ – Katie did the air quotes when she said it – at the ‘garbage-market’. Adam was surprised when she suggested it. He’d known people who dived for dinner every night. He’d even joined them himself a couple of times. But that was in San Francisco, where anti-consumerist freegans shared the dumpster spoils with hungry winos and crackheads. Here in Sydney where the few who weren’t auditioning for Wall Street in the Antipodes still lived comfortably thanks to the social-security-welfare-safety-net, the idea of eating garbage was shocking.
‘I think you need to update your guidebook,’ Katie said. ‘You seem to think it’s 1989.’
Adam counted back; she was right. Everything he thought he knew about this place had come from Eugenie, but she hadn’t lived here for over a decade. She was as American as Adam, really, except for the accent. There was something else, too: a belief in the power of Australia to heal its own; a deadly romanticism.
They’d arrived at the concrete lot behind the Broadway shopping mall. Half-a-dozen blue-steel industrial dumpsters swarmed with fruit flies as well as the fat, buzzing common variety. ‘I’ll go in; you check the goods,’ Katie said. ‘Boost me.’
Adam knelt down so she could climb onto his shoulders. ‘We could be anywhere in the world,’ he said.
‘Sure, anywhere people chuck out enough food to feed the Chinese army every night.’
‘Yeah, no, I mean . . . Not doing this, just . . . Eugenie wanted so much to come back here, like it was magical. But it’s the same as everywhere else. I don’t think she knew that.’ And the thought was treacherous, as if he’d said I don’t think she knew much at all.
‘Tell me about her. Was she beautiful?’ Katie asked, her head just visible over the top of the dumpster. It was impossible to know if her dusky halo was a lighting effect courtesy of the setting sun, or a cloud of food dust and grime rising up from beneath her.
‘No,’ Adam said. He pushed away the image of Eugenie kneeling in front of the toilet, spitting blood, and focused instead on the way she was that first day in the park: her jerky walk, talcum smell, gooseflesh skin. ‘Not beautiful. Lovely.’
‘Lovely,’ Katie echoed, handing him a dusty flour sack. ‘Give these a try.’
Adam sniffed the contents, then took a couple of items out and squeezed. ‘Donuts, some bagels. Fresh enough.’
‘I thought she must have been beautiful, you know, to be with you. I imagined her as super glamorous, some sexy Amazon with glossy hair, big tits, big lips.’ She threw a leg over the rim of the dumpster.
‘You think that’s my type?’ Adam helped her out. Over her shoulder, he saw a trio of women with shaved heads and facial jewellery walking towards them.
‘Next dumpster?’
‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘People coming.’
Katie turned to see. ‘Nah, they won’t care.’ She waved at the women. ‘Hey! Do you want some donuts? Plenty to go around.’ The women – girls, he saw, now they were closer – looked at each other and giggled. ‘Skank!’ one of them yelled, and they all started walking faster.
‘God, you don’t have to run away. Just being friendly. I wasn’t going to force you or anything.’ Katie turned to Adam. ‘More for us, hey. Boost me again?’
He helped her into the next dumpster and watched the girls disappear into the shopping mall. All three wore denim cut-offs and combat boots; the tallest wore a chocolate brown string-bikini top, showing off an impressive array of body art for someone who couldn’t have been more than eighteen.
‘Oi!’ Katie hit him on the head with something hard in a plastic bag. ‘So that’s your type, eh? Try-hard punk girls. Shaved head, tatts, nipple rings, bad attitude.’
‘Actually, yeah. I guess it is. Or was, anyway. Before . . . Christ, it stinks.’ He looked into the bag Katie had thrown down: several blackening bananas and a loaf of white sandwich bread. ‘We done you think?’
‘Yeah. We’ll hit the bakery on Glebe Point Road tomorrow. You’ve got to get there right on six if you want the good stuff. I got a vegetable curry pie there once. Best meal I had in my life.’
‘One time back home, I got a whole roast chicken, stuffing and everything. I went back every night but never saw so much as a wing in there again.’
‘God, I’d kill for some chicken. Wouldn’t risk dumpster meat on a day like this, but. Asking for a hospital trip.’
‘We’ve got some decent stuff here. We’ll have mashed banana bagels with donuts for dessert.’
‘Bernaana. So cute.’
‘It’s not nice to make fun of minorities, Katie.’
‘Ha! Middle-class, white American male. Some minority.’
‘Here it is. This place is lousy with Brits and Kiwis but none of my people,’ Adam said. ‘I should call my mom. She loves minorities.’
‘Ooh, he mentioned a mother!’ She sprang in front of him, flinging her arms around, walking backwards. ‘I want to know about the mother. Who is this woman? What did she do to you? Tell me, Adam; tell me about your mom.’
‘She’s not your typical suburban mom, but that’s cool.’
‘Not typical how?’
‘She’s real political, an activist. Most of my childhood we lived in this old mansion owned by this crazy old hippy. It was a sort of an open home for radicals and their kids. Everything belonged to everybody and all the moms took responsibility for all the kids.’
‘That sounds awesome. Was it?’
‘It was okay. It seemed normal to me.’
‘And your dad?’
‘Never knew him. The story goes that my mom, having made the decision to become a mother, went to this herbalist-slash-witchdoctor and got a potion guaranteed to produce a girl. But the unsuspecting sperm donor – my dad – was real sweaty and the potion washed away while they were boning.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Katie, falling into step, snaking an arm around his back.
‘Probably. My mom and her friends are expert at creating personal mythologies. So, naturally, the story of my creation is all about what an amazing humanitarian she is. The way she tells it, she was bummed when she discovered she had a boy-child, but she decided to keep me, anyway.’
‘You’re exaggerating. You’re too sweet to have been raised by some rabid man-hater.’
‘She doesn’t hate men. She distrusts them – us – especially those of us who are able-bodied, straight an
d white. You know, we have unearnt authority, unearnt opportunity, no awareness of our privilege. She says she almost feels sorry for us because our status means we can never really know what it is to struggle and so can never know how good it feels to overcome adversity. The “almost” is important here: she made sure I never forgot for one moment that the last person she could ever feel sorry for was me.’
‘Honey, you are breaking my heart.’
‘I’m not telling you anything else.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Katie said. ‘My dad took off before I was born and my mum left me with my grandparents when I was thirteen because she couldn’t handle my moods now that she had a new husband and baby to take care of. I can boo-hoo at you, if I want. Continue!’
‘All right. Same as any other kid, I wanted my mom to love me. I was always trying to find ways to please her. I couldn’t help being white, but I had lots of black and Latino friends, which was good. Being able-bodied was another flaw . . .’
‘You inherited that self-mythologising thing, huh? For real, man, if you’d wanted to lose an arm you would have found a way. I’ve never heard such a load of shit.’
Adam knew Katie was right, sort of. It wasn’t like he’d seriously gone out to get hurt. But he did consciously try to make his mom worry, subconsciously wishing for permanent harm. That was Eugenie’s explanation of his behaviour, too.
‘Anyway, when I was sixteen I hit on the perfect solution: I decided to be gay.’
‘Oh my lord, this is good.’ They had reached their building. Katie took the box from Adam’s arms and placed it on the ground. ‘If we go in you won’t finish.’ She pushed him onto the front step and sat beside him. ‘Go on.’
The stone griffins guarding the entrance to the shopping mall scowled down at him from across the street. Who puts griffins over the entry to a mall? Not even shopping obsessed Sydneysiders would consider a mall worthy of supernatural protection. No, it must have been the other way around: the griffins were supposed to be guarding something else, something precious and important, but they slacked off and the precious, important thing was stolen from beneath their lazy eyes and replaced with racks of jeans and piles of bath towels.
Smoke in the Room Page 7