by Debra Oswald
During these strange recent months, Celia discovered that the sorrow of losing Marcus was still present in her body, like a sac of poison that had never been properly absorbed. It was now leaking out, permeating every cell. She was experiencing it freshly, recalling the exact flavour of the pain from all those years ago.
Celia had come to her sister-in-law’s house today out of the need to be with someone who had known her husband, who had cared about the man as much as she did. She trusted Freya would understand that without needing to discuss it.
In fact, the two women had only one conversation of any significance during the day.
‘She hasn’t contacted you, has she?’ Celia asked. She knew Zoe loved Freya.
‘No.’
‘If she rang and swore you to secrecy . . .’
‘If she rang me, I would tell you,’ said Freya firmly.
When Freya went out in the mid-afternoon to collect her kids from school, Celia put her shoes on and left before they came back.
From then on, her day/night cycle was permanently inverted. She would sleep in a motel room for a few hours in the middle of the day so she could stay out until the next morning. Night was when she needed to concentrate, because night-time was when bad things happened to people. Celia couldn’t bear the idea of being sunk into mindless sleep at the exact moment Zoe was facing some monster. She needed to summon up images of what might be happening to Zoe and run through the scenes of danger in her head, to create a force field around her.
And through the night, she scanned the streams of people hopping on buses, eating hamburgers, meeting friends on street corners, and she would have to fight the impulse to roar at them. The earth’s crust had split open and sucked her daughter down where she couldn’t find her, while all these people were scurrying around on the surface as if nothing had changed.
It had been a heavy-duty night at La Parisienne. The cash register had been a bastard to sort out and the new waitress possessed the mathematical ability of a house brick. Sheena didn’t make it back to the flat until six a.m.
She eased the bedroom door open to see Murray asleep on the mattress. A month ago he was kicked out of his share house and she’d let him move his stuff into her room for a while. He’d been there ever since.
Sheena was well aware she was a bad-tempered scrag, intolerant of other people’s habits, bodily noises and the stupid thoughts she knew were buzzing through their heads. But the truth was, she hated being alone more than she hated the irritating proximity of other human beings. This was a pathetic way to be. She wished she could hack being on her own. It was one of the things she admired about Celia – running that farm single-handed, handling so many solitary hours during the day and then every night in her bed alone.
Anyway, Sheena had meandered into a live-in relationship with The Dickless Wonder again – a situation that turned out to be pretty ordinary. Exactly as she would have predicted it would be. Which made her angry with herself and even more pissed off with the world.
Murray had two part-time jobs when he moved in, but both of those evaporated. There was then a lot of yappety-yap about well-paid work coming up, dudes who would be calling, excellent opportunities on the horizon. But of course no dudes called and the horizon was unobscured by any opportunities. Sheena couldn’t kid herself any more: she was supporting a guy whose only contribution to her life, other than his pretty average cock, was the bong water he spilled on the carpet of the flat for which she paid the rent.
Murray wasn’t a bad guy. He could be funny sometimes and he wasn’t nasty or violent or criminal (apart from dealing a small amount of weed). He put up with Sheena’s sour moods – her snarky comments just slid off his Teflon-coated surface. That placid demeanour was another facet of his profound laziness. He wouldn’t waste energy reacting to stuff she said to him, especially if there was a risk she would be less likely to buy the milk and cereal that sustained him. Opportunistic sloth was his gift, like a moss growing on other plants to suck up their nutrients.
Sheena lay on the mattress, too exhausted to strip off her work uniform, let alone have a shower. Murray, flaked out in the bed, flopped his sleepy arm heavily across her belly and then his fingers gradually woke up, snaking inside the top of her fishnets, like a parasitic organism burrowing its way into the host animal.
Sheena sighed, poised to slap his hand away, but then she changed her mind, yanked the wretched fishnets down her thighs and tossed them on the floor. Murray would be easier to handle all day if he scored a root. And she was in such a low mood, she wanted to feel someone touching her.
Moments later he was humping away on top of her. (His dick was the least lazy part of him.) With his neck pressed against Sheena’s face, he smelled of dope and the coloured popcorn he liked to buy in jumbo packets. Lying under him now, she recalled a stupid conversation they’d had a few days before. She had been watching him as he sat in front of the TV with a big plastic bowl of the sugar-encrusted kiddie popcorn, selecting one colour at a time – the bright-red ones or the electric-blue ones – to pop into his gob.
‘What’s the colour thing in aid of?’ she had asked. ‘Why do you do that?’
‘I don’t want to mix the flavours up in my mouth,’ explained Murray, The Genius.
‘That’s just artificial colouring, not actual flavour, you moron. What flavour do you reckon the red ones are?’
‘Strawberry?’ Murray shrugged. ‘Some kind of fruit.’
‘Fruit? Do you honestly believe a piece of fruit has been within two miles of that piece of crap?’
He didn’t respond, just kept staring at the screen and chewing with his stupid mouth slightly open. He started to pick out the blue bits of candied popcorn.
She knew it was crazy to persist but she couldn’t help it. ‘What flavour can you detect in the blue ones you’re eating now? Blue flavour? Try eating them blindfolded, you monumental tool. They all taste the fucking same. They taste of sugar.’
‘How come you care so much about the way I eat popcorn?’ he asked.
‘I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t fucking care,’ she had snarled and forced herself to walk away into the bedroom.
She didn’t like the person she was with him. He might be a gormless slob but when she was with him, she became a carping witch.
Now, in bed, Murray was emitting the little gasping grunts he made when he was working for his orgasm. She fantasised they were the choking noises of him getting popcorn stuck in his throat.
In the past, there had always been some variety of Kieran crisis that would allow Sheena to extricate herself from a substandard situation. These were never phoney excuses – they were real messes that required a rescue mission by Sheena. But now she didn’t even have the excuse of Kieran, seeing as she had cut dead all feeling for her brother.
After the sex, Murray flopped over to his side of the bed and was snuffling back to unconsciousness. Sheena should have done the same, but she was too scratchy and antsy to sleep. She jumped out of bed, pulled on jeans and a clean T-shirt, and headed out the door, intending to get her ears re-pierced. She’d taken out the hoops during her stint picking fruit, and the holes had closed over since the summer. Now, suddenly, today, she was seized by the need to get them re-pierced as soon as possible.
It was once she was out on the street that she realised it was still only six-thirty, too early for any piercing place to be open. Even the tattoo parlours shut for a few hours after four a.m.
There was a chemist shop on Surfers Paradise Boulevard that might open fairly soon. She’d seen a lady in there doing ear- piercing at a little set-up in the corner, wearing a white zip-up uniform to give the impression she was some kind of medical professional. In fact she was just a lady who worked in a shop, selling tampons and tinea cream.
Sheena headed in the direction of that chemist, which meant walking past shopfronts. In the plate-glass windows, she caught her reflection at an unexpected angle that made her suddenly see herself. She was s
urprised how young she looked. Sheena had only just turned twenty-eight but she felt so much older than that.
She turned away from the shop windows and walked out to the Esplanade. She was just crossing to the grassy part when a young guy swung round the corner on a motorbike. Kieran. Riding without a helmet, which was the kind of stupid shit he would do. So Kieran had stumbled his way up to Queensland, which wasn’t surprising. But a second later, the motorcyclist turned his head and he wasn’t Kieran.
From the age of five, Sheena had been lumped with looking after her younger brothers as each baby came home from hospital to whichever house they were living in and whichever bloke her mother was shacked up with at the time. Even as a little kid, she knew her mother couldn’t be relied on to take care of her own babies, not for every single moment babies needed looking after. Sheena didn’t know when she acquired this awareness of her mother’s inadequacies – it was just knowledge there in her head before conscious memory. So Sheena had to do it – look after her brothers – because she didn’t want to be responsible for them starving to death or falling off the landing and cracking their baby skulls open. But she resented it fiercely. Those babies stank and shat and cried so fucking loudly it was like someone punching her constantly in the temple. Her mother’s boyfriends were never much use, even when the bawling, shitting baby in question was the fruit of their particular loins. And the babies themselves never took into account who did the looking-after – they were just as likely to puke up on Sheena and then smile at some random loser who’d never done anything for them.
By the time Kieran, the fourth brother, was born, Sheena was nine years old and already an angry, dark girl with low expectations of the adults assembled around her and suspicions about the world beyond them. From the day Kieran came home from the hospital, he was different from the other brothers. He looked up at Sheena from the crib and they locked eyes. She loved him passionately, furiously.
He didn’t sleep much. When he was so full of twitchy beans that he was driving everyone else in the house mental, Sheena would chuck him in the pram and wheel him around the neighbourhood. He’d be cheerful little fucker then, squealing and laughing and yabbering to every person, dog or rubbish bin they passed. His smile was one of the few things on earth that could spark joy in cranky little Sheena. She knew she wasn’t being singled out for those smiles – Kieran loved everyone – but that didn’t matter to her. It was her job to protect this brother. In return, she was able to tap into the positive energy source he had brought into their house.
Taking care of this brother as he grew up wasn’t easy, once their hopeless family and the messed-up world were stirred in with Kieran’s own dizzy personality. Especially once he started getting himself entangled with a poisonous type like Mick.
Over the last couple of years, there had been many times Sheena vowed to give up on Kieran and keep her distance from the family. Even so, whenever there was a crisis involving her youngest brother, she would go back.
But that last time would be the last time. She had driven him away from Sydney, with clean pillowcases wrapped round his bleeding, cut-up feet, while he slept on the back seat. Driving through the night and the next morning, she kept twisting round to look at his sleeping face, checking he was breathing, as she had when he was a toddler with bronchitis. On that trip out west, she had doubted she could bear it anymore – that is, the desperate business of hoping Kieran would stay alive.
She should have realised that whole trip was pointless. She couldn’t drive him away from risky situations. She couldn’t transport Kieran beyond his own capacity to get into trouble. And then when he ran off with that girl, he had pissed all over every attempt she’d ever made to help him. So, fuck him.
At times in the past five months, Sheena had had an urge to ring Celia or the old lady. She kept both their phone numbers on a piece of paper in the leather pouch she used for her jewellery. She could ring and ask if they’d heard anything, had seen Kieran, whatever. But she must resist that urge. She couldn’t be drawn back into caring, or even wondering, what happened to him.
By now she had walked down close to the beach. There were only a few surfers and people walking their dogs. An overtanned old dude in Speedos, leathery skin puckered across his chest, jogged along the sand in front of her.
Sheena took a few steps closer to the water and angled her gaze away from the surf break, so no one was in her eye line. From the spot she was standing, with an unobstructed view of the ocean and the morning sky, you would have no idea Surfers Paradise was right behind you. You could kid yourself none of that shit existed.
Sheena kicked off her sneakers and slipped the money from her pocket into the toe of one shoe. Then she walked straight into the water, pausing to allow each breaking wave to bash against her jeans before wading further out. This was better than a shower. Once she was out deep enough, she dived under again and again. She flicked her head around underwater, rinsing the smell of Murray and Tia Maria and other people’s cigarettes out of her hair. She let the clean salt water flush out all the accumulated crap in her head and the sand scour away any last bits of filth.
When she stepped out of the water, she carried her shoes and walked barefoot back to the flat, her sodden jeans and T-shirt sticking to her and the fine crust of salt drying on her face.
Murray was still asleep, so she thumped the door jamb a couple of times. He sat up, squinting, confused to see Sheena’s wet hair dripping on the carpet.
‘I’m leaving,’ she said.
‘ To go where?’
‘Not sure. Maybe Sydney to start with.’
‘Cool. If you lend me enough for the bus, I’ll come with you.’
‘No. No, you moron. I’m leaving you. I’m breaking up with you. That’s the whole point of going to – well, that’s part of why I’m going to Sydney.’
‘To do what?’
‘I don’t know. But not this.’
*
In late July, Roza saw the headlights of the ute pass by her house just before dawn. By the time Roza had walked up the path to Celia’s house, Celia had already put herself into bed.
She never explained why she had abandoned the search in the city, but from what Roza could see, her beloved friend was worn out beyond a person’s ability to function in the world, and sleep-deprived to the point of delirium. It had been an act of foolishness for Celia to drive a vehicle all the way back to the district in such a state, and a piece of luck there had not been an accident. Perhaps she planned to recuperate a while and then head back out on her searching. She didn’t say and Roza didn’t ask.
Joe rushed out to the property the moment Roza told him Celia was home. He brought bags and bags of food to stock Celia’s fridge. He insisted his mother point out little jobs that needed doing around Celia’s house so he had an excuse to linger for some hours, until she emerged from the bedroom.
‘Hello, Joe,’ she said as she padded out to the kitchen in socks. Wearing baggy track pants and a voluminous Aran sweater that had belonged to her husband, Celia’s body barely seemed to be present inside the loose folds of fabric.
‘Hi,’ said Joe.
Roza watched him take a step forward, arms lifting slightly, ready to fold Celia in to him, but then, suddenly not sure his embrace would be welcome, he dropped his hands and slid them down the side of his suit pants. Maybe she was radiating a don’t-touch-me signal that Joe detected. Maybe she seemed too fragile to engage with another person, even if it was just the engagement required to receive a comforting embrace. Or perhaps what Celia really wanted was for Joe to shred all those doubts and cautions so he could reach across and grab her firmly. Either way, he stood awkwardly in the middle of the kitchen and she remained in the doorway.
‘Mum’s filled me in on the latest,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know if I hear anything.’
Celia nodded. An anaemic smile.
‘I hope you’ll tell me if there’s anything I can do,’ said Joe.
Now she
was back home, Celia stayed indoors, much of the time in bed. If anyone came to the door, she pretended to be asleep. After a while, local friends understood she didn’t want visitors, so they kept away and just rang Roza from time to time to check up.
Roza cooked food that might tempt Celia to eat, walking up every day to collect the used-up dish from the kitchen bench and put a fresh meal in the fridge. From what she could see, Celia wasn’t eating a great amount – just enough to live.
Sheena hadn’t spent time inside many men’s toilets in her life, but she’d seen a few. Enough to reckon that the front bar of this pub, with its insipid green tiles, yellow linoleum floor and mirrors eaten away at the edges like leprosy, looked a lot like a gents’.
As she walked in, she regretted suggesting it as a meeting place. There were a couple of other hotels around Parramatta that had been revamped, done up like a Spanish hacienda or filled with fake Tudor shit. Maybe she should have picked one of those. She wouldn’t want anyone thinking this kind of grotty old-blokes bar was her natural habitat. But the location of this pub was easy to explain, and anyway, people always thought whatever they wanted to think, no matter what she did.
She spotted Joe at one of the window tables. He’d probably got there dead-set early – he was that kind of guy. He stood as she walked over and they said ‘Hi’ simultaneously. There was an awkward little manoeuvre on approach, with Joe presumably unsure about the etiquette for greeting a younger woman he’d fucked once, a woman whose drug-addled brother had run off with his sort-of-niece and torn out the heart of the girl’s mother. Sheena wasn’t too sure about the etiquette from her end, either. So they both froze for a second until Joe lurched forward to give her a peck on the cheek.
‘Thanks for meeting me,’ he said. ‘Let me get you a drink.’
‘Sure. Ta. A middy.’
While Joe stood at the bar getting them both beers, Sheena had a chance to observe him for a moment. He was an attractive man, even though she’d never gone for older guys as a rule. She remembered what his body looked like under that suit. It was weird to dwell on her intimate knowledge of the body of a person she’d shagged, but a person she didn’t know very well and certainly had no claim on.