Zigzag Street

by Nick Earls

  No. Why would people like it? It’s the stuff I want to change.

  Don’t. Just brush my hair, okay?

  So I brush. And in all my intimacy fantasies I never imagined this. Me brushing her hair and feeling like this. I feel her hair slip through the brush and through my fingers, stroke after stroke. I shape it over her ears and brush right out to its tips and watch it fall softly down to her shoulders. And I put the brush down and rub her neck when she wants me to, and she undoes buttons and I rub her shoulders. Then she’s face down on the bed and I’m kissing her bare back, rubbing my hands over her back.

  So it goes, until we’re both wearing nothing and holding each other, lying under a sheet in the dark with the moon coming in the window, over my shoulder, glinting in her eyes.

  I can’t see your face, she says. I want to see your face. So I roll onto my back and she lifts her head up and looks at me and says, You will stay, won’t you?

  Yes.

  She leans over me and kisses me on the mouth, says, Good, and lies down again, and sleeps. I lie awake a while listening to the traffic, quite far away. I make myself think about other things, about Anna, as though I’m testing myself out. And I think right now I am where I want to be.

  When it’s light I wake on my side near the edge of the bed, as Rachel has already taken over the middle, and the sheet. Maybe it’s good to get these things sorted out early.

  I get up and shut the curtains so it’s dark again, and we sleep till nearly nine.

  I don’t want to go to work today, she says, stretching. I want to do other things today.

  So I call work and I tell them I had my stitches out last night, but there’s a problem with the wound, so I may have to stay in bed for the next three days. Rachel takes the baton and calls her work and tells them it’s to do with the head injury she suffered last week, and that it’s quite possible she’ll have to stay in bed for the next three days.

  We make these calls in her lounge room, wrapped in the same sheet, and then we shuffle back to bed. I kiss her mouth and her breasts and things move quickly and her legs are round me and this is different to last night. And she’s showing me where she wants to be touched and biting her lip again and breathing hard.

  And she says, Have you … have you got a condom?

  Then I have a bad feeling. I know we need a condom. I would almost give my life for a condom right now, a plain, lubricated Checkmate. But all I’ve got, and I know it’s all I’ve got, is the rooster. This is an impossible bind. I can’t get dressed now and drive down to the chemist and back and hope the mood won’t be dead when I get here. The mood is now. The condom is the rooster.

  Yeah, I say, and I reach for my wallet on the bedside table. I open the condom beneath the sheet, but there’s that rooster head, lubricated in my hand. This is no regular colourless, flavourless plain Checkmate. Tell me if you have a problem with this, I say to her, and I guide her hand to it.

  No.

  So, I don the rooster. And I don’t know what it does for her, but I’m already gone, completely lost in this as though there’s nothing else. She closes her eyes and bites her lip again, grips hold of my back and we move against each other. I can feel her thigh under my hand, the muscles of her thigh contracting and relaxing, contracting and relaxing. We both start to sweat and there is sweat between us, sweat from our warm skins wrapped in this sheet, sweat prickling in my hair. And our breathing gets rough and her mouth’s wide open now and I’ve got to hold back, I’ve got to hold back.

  I do some counting, down from a thousand in threes and then thirteens, and this is just incredible. I square thirty-seven, and I can hear my own voice, just making senseless noise. I try to recall the names of all Australian batsmen who scored centuries on debut, in chronological order, and I’ve just reached Dirk Wellham when she says, Yes, yes.

  Afterwards we lie wrapped in the sheet in our sweat for some time and our breathing slowly settles down. She smiles at me, laughs softly, flops her head flat back onto her pillow.

  This is such a man thing, she says, but I think I want to have another sleep.

  So sleep. You can owe me one.

  And I unravel myself and go and attend to the rooster, now as limp as a chicken on a hook.

  She is asleep when I get back, though I can’t have been gone two minutes, so I move in beside her and she puts her arm over me and I sleep too.

  I wake at about eleven and she’s awake already and still there, which is a nice change. I want to tell her that usually when I have sex with someone they’ve got their head down a toilet screaming by now. But I don’t.

  It would be okay if you bought more of those, she says. I’ve never used anything like that before.

  No, neither have I. I’ve only ever bought them for people as a joke.

  I want to do it again.

  You mean now?

  Yeah. Now. There’s a problem with now?

  I only had one.

  That’s very disappointing. I really want to do it again now. Hey, maybe the girls have some stashed away. Let’s check their rooms.

  Is that okay?

  Sure. They’d do the same. We share things. Girls do that. They’ll probably just be regular ones though, but that’s okay. Just stay here. She takes the sheet and goes. Nothing in Mel’s, she calls out, and she goes into Kathy’s. Hey.

  What?

  Wait and see.

  And while she’s out there she puts on a CD, The Triffids, Calenture. She comes back in with a yellow rooster condom from Kathy’s bedside drawer and says, I’ve just put ‘Bury Me Deep in Love’ on repeat if that’s okay. This time it takes at least as long, but I just go with it, no Australian batsmen, minimal maths. And we lie there quite a while after, on our sides, looking at each other, and we don’t say much. I can’t say much. If I say anything I think I’ll say everything.

  Eventually, when we’ve heard ‘Bury Me Deep in Love’ about a million times, I get up and I take the CD player off repeat and I fetch us glasses of water. On the way back I notice a guitar in Kathy’s room. On impulse I go in and play a few chords, since it’s been ages since I picked up a guitar.

  Bring it in here, Rachel shouts. Play something.

  The curtains are half open now and the room is almost glaringly bright. I give her the water and she tells me again to play something. So I sit in the old arm chair in the corner where the sun comes in and she drinks her water and I strum around a bit before working my way into a few things I think I’m borrowing from Bob Dylan, even though I’m making up the words.

  She laughs and calls me a genius and insists on taking my photo and, since I’m stupidly happy, I let her. She says it’ll look good with her mug shots from the medical centre.

  You know what I should do? I say. You know what I should do at the next office Christmas party? I should take the mike and do Dan Hill’s ‘Sometimes When we Touch’. What do you think of that song?

  I deliberately pick it because it’s enduringly crappy and she, after a short pause, says, I think it’s one of the classic ballads, and after a slightly longer pause she tells me to get fucked.

  I laugh and she says, You’re a really funny guy. A really funny guy.

  We get dressed and we go out for burgers, and she says, Let’s go to your place. I want to help you paint.

  There are two messages on the answering machine when we get there. My mother saying, Just calling to find out how the renovating’s going, and Hillary saying, I guess you’re not supposed to get up to answer the phone even. Well, I hope you’re okay. I was just calling to tell you, and for a moment I’m tense, suddenly thinking of things she might tell me, that since the initial injury happened at work, technically, this should all be covered by worker’s comp, so you’ll have to make sure you get the paperwork sorted out when you come back.

  We walk through the rooms talking about various things that might be done to improve them and she sees the loofa’d wardrobe.

  Did you do this?

  Yeah, maybe
.

  Pretty controversial. Pretty courageous. And she’s nodding respectfully.

  You like it?

  She just smiles, the restrained smile of a small victory.

  Are you bullshitting me?

  And she looks at the wardrobe, looks back at me, says with a calm kind of cruelty, It’s a possibility.

  So I feed Greg, and she looks at my mother’s paint scheme and she says, Is this heritage? Is this really heritage, this place? What colour was this house when it was built?

  I go into my room and I get the silver cigarette case and I show her the letter from 1923. She reads it, a couple of times.

  Then that’s what it should be, I think. If you want to know what I think.

  My mother wants heritage.

  Then we’ll talk to your mother, if you want. This house has heritage, small h heritage, its own thing. Maybe that’s what you have to look after. It wasn’t built in the 1880s. It was built in the 1920s, and it was built for a good reason. This is your grandparents’ house. It’s quite a letter, isn’t it? It must be an interesting story, the two of them and what they went through.

  Yeah. I don’t know the story. I just found the letter a couple of weeks ago. I never knew any of it before then. My grandfather died when I was young and he never told me any of that. Neither did my grandmother and she only died a few months ago. I wish I’d found the letter before, or something else that might have made me ask something. It’s like a space I want to fill in. Maybe I should talk to my mother.

  My grandfather, the Vilikovski grandfather, I don’t know much about him. He was a White Russian, an army colonel, Anatole Vilikovski. He came from an aristocratic background. He was posted to the Ukraine very late in the war and he disappeared. The story is that this was deliberate, part of a Stalinist purge. I don’t know the details. My grandmother had to get away, and she was pregnant with my father. So my father was born in Harbin, in China. They never heard anything about my grandfather again. We don’t even have a photo. My grandmother said there was a portrait painted of him in uniform, when he was quite young, but it’s hard to imagine that it survived. So, as far as I know she was the last person to die who knew his face. You’re lucky with this letter.

  Yeah.

  So maybe I won’t get all the answers, and maybe I won’t need them. And maybe there are some questions I should just stop asking now. Some spaces that can be left as spaces if I can’t fill them. Some things I don’t need to know any more. Other things that I might know instead, that I might discover slowly.

  We came here to paint, and we don’t. I’m still stalled two and a half verandah railings into the renovation, but the story’s very different now.

  I go into the kitchen to make coffee.

  Rachel says, Hey, albums, vinyl. Can I put on some music?

  She sorts through the pile and plays The Queen is Dead. Leaves her fingerprints on some other part of my past. Turns it from a story and back into an album again. And one day maybe I won’t recall who gave it to me, or if I do, I won’t give it a second thought.

  And I want to go into the lounge room now with her coffee and tell her. Tell her now. You remind me of no-one.

  Acknowledgments

  This is, of course, a work of fiction. There are, however, a number of people with a vested interest in some of its parts, I thank them for their generosity (and foolhardiness) in allowing me to borrow the things they’ve said, done and been that I’ve taken, given to fictional characters and put into this story.

  Thank you Alison, Alison, Alison, Amanda, Anna, Dean, Dicka, Doug, Ermana, Fiona, Gerard, Greg, James, Jane, Jeff, John, Jon, Lydia, Matthew, Matthew, Michael, my parents and grandparents, Natasha (and her house), Nick, Paul, Purvis, Sarah, Simone, Tara and Veny. The bits that aren’t yours I made up.

  Thanks also to Baan Thai for consistently excellent panang nua, to the staff and clientele of Le Chalet for their tolerance on the night of Jon’s thirtieth, to everyone who was involved with the aforementioned videos, bands and world record attempts, and to Fiona, Laura and Bernadette for making this happen (and Nick for understanding the dilemmas surrounding the Swiss Army knife).

  The author thanks Stuart Glover for use of material in the creation of this work.