Watermark

by Joanna Atherfold Finn

  ‘That’s because you wolfed it down, Kevin. And you don’t need to put an ed on the end of coughed. It’s already there.’ He turned to his daughter and shook his head. ‘I’m just concentrating on Kevin’s “ed” issue at the moment. I don’t think I’ll ever get him to say “Father”, though. It might be to do with his overbite.’

  Josephine placed her hand on Travis’s knee and squeezed. ‘Dad, do you think we could have a conversation without Kevin?’ she said. She’d been using this passive counselling language on Travis as well lately, but God help him if he gave the wrong answer.

  Gordon tilted his head as though seriously pondering that possibility. ‘She’s right, Kevin. That’s enough out of you. I’d hazard a guess that Josephine and Travis think we’re a bit bloody weird.’

  ‘Is that like a bloody bone, Farver?’ he added in his dog voice, and then he held Kevin’s face in his hands. Staring into the dog’s eyes, Gordon bit his tongue. ‘Th, Kevin. Fa-ther,’ he said.

  • • •

  Josephine poured iced tea from a carafe into three chilled blue glasses. She’d added mint from the garden and wedges of lemon. Travis flicked through the Australasian Science magazine, easing the moist pages apart. Gordon pulled his legs up on the chair and worked on a half-finished crossword.

  ‘Scrupulous single man with high disposable income. Neologism,’ Gordon said.

  ‘Woofter,’ he bellowed and then winked at his dog.

  ‘No, Kevin, it has eleven letters. But that was a good try.’

  Travis took a gulp of his drink and then looked at his watch.

  ‘I think, Kevin,’ Josephine said, glaring at her father, ‘that the word you are after is poofter, and the word Dad is after is metrosexual.’

  ‘Yes, Josephine. It fits. She’s clever, our Josephine, isn’t she Kevin?’

  ‘No life skills, Farver, but she’s clever in a way. She’d be no good with obedience training. She can’t even wiggle her ears.’

  ‘No. Probably not. But then you’ve had lots of practice,’ Gordon said.

  Josephine saw herself sitting in the school playground with her dad; how his ear-wiggling routine had been the ice-breaker that stopped her being snubbed by the other kids. She was brought back to reality by the sight of Travis tearing up a mint leaf, then putting his fist to his nose and closing his eyes. Josephine reached across the table and rested her hand in the crook of her dad’s elbow.

  ‘Dad. I’m going to put Kevin in the yard. I need to have a proper conversation with you.’

  ‘He astral travels, don’t you, Kevin?’

  ‘Dad, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Now come on, love. You’re the last person I’d expect to be judgemental. You’re into all that hippity-hip stuff, aren’t you? It caught me by surprise too. Sometimes he’ll be up in the bush, trotting around in the undergrowth, and I’ll say something and he’ll correct me. He’ll do it from all the way up there. Remarkable. I know you think I’m just pulling your leg, but one day you’ll come to accept Kevin’s talents.’

  Josephine responded with an acquiescent smile. She had circled the next words in her head all morning. They were tiny black words that skipped and ducked, as jumpy as crows on a carcass. She puffed her skirt out over her legs and the orange beads jingled. She took a slow, deliberate breath and then made the announcement. ‘Dad, Travis and I are going overseas next month.’

  ‘Europe,’ Travis blurted out, bursting through the morning’s inertia like a pistol. ‘A ski thing. I’ve never skied before. Get away from this heat.’

  Gordon ignored Travis and looked directly at his daughter. His eyes had always been a startling blue, and if anything his current pastiness enhanced them. She instantly felt like a child about to be chastised. They both knew the significance of the timing. They both knew that in two weeks time people would ring. Well-meaning people who would want to rehash memories that didn’t belong to them. It was an occasion that relied on them sticking together. She’d reneged on an unspoken agreement.

  Gordon nodded slowly, too many times, and then his brilliant eyes flickered. ‘Heat’s not so bad. Sophie the terrier next door is on heat. She smells lovely,’ he said, then shook his head at the dog. ‘I don’t know if that’s polite coffee-table conversation, Kev,’ he added.

  Travis opened his mouth, about to speak, but Josephine dug her nails into his leg.

  ‘Dad, for God’s sake. We’re planning to go for six weeks. We need to talk about this.’

  ‘It’s a package,’ Travis added uselessly. He pushed himself back into the lounge, shirking Gordon’s gaze.

  ‘And, Dad,’ she continued in her soothing voice, ‘we thought it would be a good idea if you stayed with Travis’s parents while we’re away. You know, summer and everything, and all that bush out the back. I’d be worried.’

  ‘And where would Kevin go while you two are off piste?’

  Travis straightened up again. The idea of this man staying with his family was ludicrous. Now he was going on like they were a couple of teenagers about to go binge drinking. He readied himself to say as much, but instead Josephine snorted her drink down her top then leaned over and gave her dad a gentle punch in the arm. They laughed together. Strangled, gasping sounds like cornered chooks. Travis had been caught out like this before. The third wheel. Their sense of humour was genetic.

  ‘That was a good one, Dad,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, that was a good one Farver,’ he ventriloquised.

  ‘There’ll be no going off piste, I can assure you. Travis is a beginner. And Kevin can go with you. Travis’s parents have a Lagotto. Stella.’

  Gordon raised his eyebrows. The optimistic light in his eyes shifted like the sun ducking behind a cloud. He took a lemon slice, chewed on the pith and shuddered.

  ‘They’re from Italy. A bit like a poodle. They don’t smell,’ Josephine ranted. ‘And before you pipe up, Kevin, some people aren’t drawn to smelly dogs.’

  ‘The dog didn’t say anything, Josephine. I’m sure Kevin’s acutely aware of the Lagotto breed, aren’t you, Kevin? Kevin? No, I think you’ve upset him.’

  Travis looked up to the ceiling and clicked his jaw. ‘For the love of God,’ he said.

  Gordon excused himself and went to the bathroom. Travis waited until the man’s footsteps faded and then he glared at Josephine.

  ‘Why do you go along with it?’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, Josephine, that you talk to the dog too. You answer the dog. You answer Kevin as though he’s worthy of a response. As though he’ll understand your clarification on matters. Psychoanalyse that for a change.’

  Travis rubbed at his crotch. He was dying for a drink, a strong one, but Gordon was a teetotaller. When Josephine was fourteen, her mother had refused to put up with Gordon’s alcohol-fuelled misdemeanours any longer. He’d rolled the family car down an embankment. He’d massacred his football club’s mascot with a soldering iron. He’d aimed and fired what he thought was an unloaded gun at the family cat. And finally, a week before his enforced rehab spell, he’d been spotted streaking through the Angophora Reserve calling out for his Mini Moke. That, according to Josephine, was the turning point. Travis had thought more than once that they hadn’t got to him soon enough.

  ‘Lots of people talk to their dogs, Travis. It’s not that unusual. I’ve seen your mother ask Stella if she’s ready for her dinner.’

  ‘Yes, but you’ve missed one small point: my mother doesn’t expect a verbal response.’

  Travis clutched his hands behind his head. Josephine noticed a single hair sticking out of his nostril, and felt the small tremor of waning affection. She thought about their plans for Europe. The train passes and the online bookings. The ski outfits. The expense of it all. She’d last skied when she was twelve, with her parents. They’d saved for the trip for years. On their first day on the snow fields, decked out in incandescent hire gear, her dad had sat on the T-bar and been dragged up the hill like a human plough
. They’d left him, wet and dishevelled, at the Après Ski Bar to have some lunch while they had their lessons. On their return, he was drinking schnapps and singing ‘Edelweiss’ to a scowling barman. He’d looked at his wife and daughter and smiled benignly. ‘Small and white, clean and bright, you look happy to meet me,’ he’d yodelled, and her mother had slapped him hard across his snow-burnt cheeks. Looking out at the sandstone wall, the parched native grasses, Josephine tried to stop the image from melting.

  ‘You know, Travis, with us living so far away, the dog is his only company. I mean, Mum was everything. She was his reason to get up in the morning. She was the one. The only one.’

  ‘I just … I just don’t know how it will even work with your dad staying at my parents’ house. I think this needs more consideration. I mean, is he going to do this dog thing there? Because I’m not sure, Josephine. I’m just not quite sure how to explain it.’

  ‘It’s just a little quirky thing, like I said in the car. He can control it, you know. It’s not like he really believes the dog talks.’

  In the distance, Gordon cleared his throat. He walked back into the room. He had combed his hair and changed into an intense green shirt and fawn shorts. His face looked a bit damp, like he’d had a wet washer on it. He took a handkerchief out of his top pocket and wiped his forehead.

  ‘Josephine, I know you think I can’t cope, but I assure you I can. I don’t need babysitting while you go away. There’s Jim and Marg up the road. Every Friday I go there and Margie does up-the-bum chicken.’

  ‘That sounds uncomfortable,’ Gordon added in his dog voice.

  ‘Not now, Kevin,’ he continued. ‘Just send me a postcard, Josephine. I’ll be fine. Really. Mark Twain said something like, “The more I know about people, the more I like my dog.” I think that was a very good observation.’

  ‘Look, Gordon …’ Travis started. He felt a bit off-colour, a bit weak. He thought it was probably due to the vego diet. He pictured his ex-girlfriend, the bank teller, in her navy work dress, sitting at McDonald’s eating a Big Mac.

  ‘Travis, go for a walk or something. Go for a walk with Kevin,’ Josephine said. Travis didn’t move and neither did Kevin, but the dog raised his eyes at the word walk. ‘It wasn’t just you, Dad. It wasn’t just you who lost her. It was me too. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry that she’s not here. And now we’ve got somewhere else we’re meant to be. And you’ll think I’m just making excuses, but I’m not. Travis’s sister is getting married. She’s having some stupid bloody hens’ thing.’ Josephine wiped her eye with her fist. She stood and collected the glasses, the drowned lemon and mint. She kissed her dad on the cheek and then she bent down and kissed the dog.

  ‘That was lovely,’ Gordon said.

  ‘I thought it was a bit slobbery,’ he said for Kevin. ‘I think I’d prefer a bloody hen.’

  • • •

  Gordon brushed his teeth and pulled on his dressing gown. It was eight in the evening and he felt exhausted. He didn’t know that his daughter had already decided, as she watched the bride-to-be drink tequila through a fluorescent phallic straw, that there would be no ski trip. Not for her, anyway. He didn’t know that on the anniversary of his wife’s death, Josephine would turn up at nine with buttery croissants. After breakfast she would drive him and Kevin down to the beach. Kevin would bark and bite at the waves and Josephine would dive under them, free-styling between the sets using the same sure stroke as her mother. He would dip his toes in, and then his legs, and finally he’d run and meet it head on. Later they would come home and play scrabble. Kevin would win with syzygy: the alignment of three celestial objects.

  Gordon shuffled down to the lounge room and turned on the television. He sat with the dog at his feet. There was a movie on. One he’d watched once before with Susan. She’d pretended to be annoyed with him because he kept interrupting and asking questions about the plot. They’d sat there with mugs of hot chocolate and she’d rubbed her painted toes over Kevin’s belly. That was the first time he’d spoken for the dog. He’d said that her toes felt very encouraging. Said that if she pressed in the right spot, it would get his back leg going.

  ‘Josephine’s probably right, you know,’ he said. ‘About the house. There’ll be a time. A time when I can’t do it. I’ll have to get something smaller. Maybe I’ll have to get someone in to help me. But I’ll make sure there’s a yard for you. A patio at least. What do you think, Kevin? Do you think that sounds like an idea?’

  The dog looked up at him and then sighed and put its head down again.

  ‘You’re right,’ Gordon said. ‘Sometimes there’s no need to say anything. Sometimes there are no words for it.’

  Lovely Day, Valmai

  Will they grant Baz permission to die? How can strangers with cross-referenced notes and prior determinations make that decision? Of course Rob now knows that judgements like that are made all the time. Not just in places like the Netherlands, but in the regional hospital he’s worked in for five years. Week one as a graduate nurse he’d naively asked the meaning of the NFR sticker on the headboard above a patient. A senior nurse had led Rob behind the front desk and rummaged around in various pigeonholes until she’d located a well-worn exercise book with ‘What They Don’t Teach You at Uni’ scrawled under the subject line. On pages one through five was a list of acronyms to photocopy and take home and memorise. Rob had trawled down the alphabetised list until he reached N. NFR = Not for Resuscitation.

  This had shocked him at the time, but as weeks turned into years he’d slowly become immune, much like a child becomes immune to infectious diseases. The thing about immunity, he decided, was that you could still be infected but the symptoms were watered down, barely visible to others. NFR became just another term. What was far more sickening, three years later, was his futile attempt on a night shift to revive a priest who should have been left to die. The priest’s month-long internment – a blur of red-flecked phlegm and incessant rants – was further marred by tearoom whispers of his transgressions. That should have been reason enough. But there was no NFR sticker. No family to offer guidance, apart from the one who’d allowed him to roam from parish to parish.

  Pushing down on the tip of the priest’s breastbone, shadowed by an over-eager student nurse keen to fit the bag-mask, Rob tried to stifle the smell of rising bile by pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth and singing in his head. It was the nursery rhyme he’d been taught, along with a room full of other rowdy first-years, back when patients were vanilla-scented mannequins that could be arranged in lewd positions when the instructor’s head was turned. The tune taught them the correct resuscitation rhythm. Of course the priest’s ashen skin hadn’t felt or smelt the same as the mannequin’s, though his eyes had a similar hollowness and the blue gaping hospital garb made him look just as defenceless. His skin was rice-paper thin, the bones of his chest cavity twig-brittle. Rob tried to reconcile what he’d heard in the tearoom, what he’d later confirmed with a few key words in a search engine and the hospital database, with the priest’s particulars on the handover sheet: William Turner, seventy-eight. Delirium of unknown cause, behavioural changes, hallucinations. Hx: smoker, anaemia, bronchiectasis, aneurism coil. 1:1 if becomes agitated, refusing medications. MRI brain. Lives alone.

  It struck Rob, as he double-checked the priest’s bag-mask for occlusion, that they could pump air through the man’s cracked lips, but they could never revive him. The priest’s oratorical tirades had subsided over days until they stopped altogether. Physically, what remained was like the fragile exoskeleton of a cicada moulting. Maybe he would re-emerge somewhere with a pliant body, brilliant green with marbled wings, and discover it was Buddhism that he should have been preaching. This flash of insight accompanied Rob’s melody as he pressed, palms open, against the priest with his full weight. Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream over and over until the priest’s ribs cracked. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily as he lost control of his bowels. Rob kept going,
trying to coax one jagged inhalation from him, but there was nothing. Rob pushed the heel of his hand down hard one final time. He told the unrelenting student nurse to stop bagging and write down the time.

  ‘That was my first,’ she said. ‘My first death. Imagine. His last vision was of you sweating and puffing on top of him.’

  ‘Life is but a dream,’ he’d said.

  These are the memories that swirl around Rob’s head as he wakes to the magpie’s chisel-peck and its high throaty garble outside his bedroom window. The magpie and Rob have an arrangement: before he goes to bed he sprinkles sunflower seeds on the pavers outside the bedroom window, and every morning its birdsong is his cue to roll out of bed, stumble, stretch and rifle around in the dim light for his exercise gear, his parking permit and his work uniform. This morning he finds his uniform slung over the back of a chair, still damp around the collar. Miranda has pinned his name badge over the ink blotch on the shirt pocket in her usual half-hearted attempt at domesticity. She’s still in bed. Half-asleep, she has formed a pilled beige blanket around her neck and dipped her face into it. Nuzzled and muzzled. Unwilling to face the day. Rob offers her eggs on toast. She can’t stomach eggs in the morning. They’ve been together for years and yet he still seems unable to acknowledge this simple detail. This is what she tells him in her muted, leave-me-alone voice. He listens to the rumble of a southerly swell, smells the brackish stench of low-tide flotsam and spume through the salt-encrusted flyscreen. He kisses her on the forehead, the only part of her face that is visible.

  ‘Want to come for a walk with me?’ he asks.

  She shrugs into the bed’s hollow centre and draws her knees up under the covers. Her overindulged dog, Bess, is in there with her, fused to her body, stubbornly refusing to move.

  ‘Go on,’ Rob says, flinging back the quilt and yanking on Bess’s hind leg. ‘Go outside and be a dog.’