Where There's Smoke

by Black Inc.

  It is eight o’clock in the morning on July the first and I still cannot sleep. I return to bed and sit and watch old black and white films for some hours, looking for Olivia de Haviland to wish her happy birthday. Then it is midday and the postman rings the doorbell once and I wait until he rings again, in honour of James M. Cain, also born this day.

  The postman is a Barbarossa of a man. Ink has come off on his large hands as if he has been making words with them. He has a package for me from Melbourne which I must sign for, and as I do so I entertain him with the history of my surname. He does not seem very interested. I take the package inside. Some history books, including one that I once wrote about the Mau-Mau rebellion. Years ago I lent them to Sarah’s sister, but I need them now for my history of Newcastle. Sometimes I think I will need every history book, from the time of Thucydides to those yet unwritten, for my history of Newcastle.

  When I open the book a photograph falls out. I stare at it for some time, for it has been so long since I have seen a photograph that was not stapled, captioned and dated. A man and a woman are standing outside a dark stone cathedral, smiling in a sunshower. The picture was taken on the July the first of 1989 in Glasgow, when I met Sarah for the first time. I could hear her in the next chamber in the cathedral before I saw her. She was leading a group of Polish students. Her Australian accent I noticed at once, but then certain other words that she pronounced differently, some rising unexpectedly, some falling. I imagined numbers over these words, leading to footnotes which explained that she had once lived in China, India, England. I watched her, fascinated. For when she spoke of the past, she threw her hand back over her shoulder, when she spoke of the present, she pointed in front of her, and the future was a sweeping gesture of both her hands. She had begun these motions to give her students visual clues for their tenses, but eventually they had become habit. She had sent her students away to look at a tapestry and she was finishing a book on a bench outside.

  ‘What are you reading?’ I asked her, and she looked up at me.

  ‘A biography. Jane Austen,’ she said.

  ‘Oh. How does it end?’

  ‘Well, she dies,’ she said, and we laughed.

  I remember how her hands moved when we arranged to meet the next evening. Later, I watched her students sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her. The next year, we were alone when I sang it to her.

  In 2004, now, I return to the 104th page of my introduction. Outside, above the houses, there is a picture of the sun in the sky that is already some minutes old. I wonder how it compares to the sun the Americans made in the Bikini Atoll, the fourth time of splitting the atom. It was on this day of course, years and years ago. After some time writing, I fall asleep and when I awaken I look at the clock. It is 5 p.m.

  In 2001 the conference I was attending at Sydney University to discuss trends in African historiography had just ended. It was Sarah’s birthday, and I was going to call her from the lobby, to tell her that I would be home soon. There was a black woman at the hotel bar. I recognised her accent as Burundian from the speech she gave about French colonialism. Her name was Clio Mbabazi. She was quite pretty and invited me to join her for a drink. ‘It is July the first,’ she said, ‘and Burundi is celebrating its independence.’ She looked at my wedding ring and my whisky. ‘And so it seems are you.’ I called Sarah at nine o’clock to wish her happy birthday and tell her that I would not be home that night, as we had planned. There was too much work to do.

  And then I am hungry and I eat using November 23, 1997 as both tablecloth and napkin. The bread is four days old, the cheese is six days old, and I am 12,875 days old. It is evening and I go to shower off the history of the day. The ink, the sweat, the dirt. It is still July the first, still, and Marlon Brando has just died on television, though he is there in the screen screaming, ‘Stella! Stella!’ I sit on the floor. Something cuts into my leg. One of Sarah’s diaries. She kept them from when she was fifteen years old. I have read them several times. In their pages I appear as an historical figure, like a Garibaldi or a Caesar. Herein, all my lies and my infidelities are recorded. ‘For an historian,’ Sarah wrote on July the first 1997, ‘my husband is no good at fabricating the past.’

  Suddenly, it seems, it is 9.02 p.m. In 2001 at this time I was in a Sydney hotel room. On the radio, Johnny Cash was singing. I kissed Clio Mbabazi and we took off our clothes. Afterward I could not sleep and I idly read the Gideon’s Bible. Much later I learnt that the society had been formed on a July the first by some Wisconsin travelling salesmen.

  It is 11.41 p.m. and in 2001 Sarah is dying on her thirtieth birthday, alone in our bed in Newcastle. A sudden heart attack. The doctors could not explain it. There was no history of heart disease in her family. If only someone had been with her, they said, she might have been saved. In Germany, Chekhov was dying too. They would take his body back to Russia in a crate marked ‘fresh oysters.’ Like Shakespeare, whom Chekhov greatly admired, Sarah was born and died on the same day.

  Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘We cannot escape history.’ It is July the first.

  THE INCONVENIENT DEAD

  JAMES BRADLEY

  A week after he killed himself, Dane Johnson came to visit Toby at the service station. It was a Friday, which wasn’t usually one of Toby’s nights, but Toby was working anyway because one of the other guys had quit unexpectedly and the manager hadn’t had time to put a replacement through the two-day unpaid customer service accreditation scheme new employees were required to complete before beginning their trial period.

  Dane appeared at the edge of the light in the service area at about ten. Toby was watching the television screen that repeated advertisements above the fridges, and though he wasn’t looking in Dane’s direction something about him caught Toby’s eye and made him turn.

  He knew straight away that whoever it was was Dead: the slow shambling motion of their walk was unmistakable. But it took a moment or two longer for him to recognise the hair and clothes, and to rise to his feet in surprise.

  For a few seconds he didn’t know what to do. He supposed he should have been frightened, but what he felt wasn’t fear, more like a sense of slippage, a queasiness, as if the world was shifting beneath him. On the screen above the fridges, the advertising montage began again, the images of people smiling photogenically at each other flickering silently across it, but Toby barely noticed. Instead he flicked the safety on the register, set down his drink and stepped out through the sliding doors.

  Dane didn’t move as Toby crossed the service area towards him, and for a moment Toby was reminded of his sister, who sleepwalked, of the way she looked when he or his parents found her in the hall or the kitchen in the small hours of the morning, the way she could appear to be awake yet somehow absent at the same time. Once people believed sleepwalkers would die if you woke them. That was a lie, Toby knew, but still he was unsure what to do when Dane didn’t seem to notice him, even when Toby was standing right in front of him. So he just said his name, first once and then again, until something seemed to register and Dane turned towards him, his eyes fixing on Toby briefly before moving on and away. Yet it was only when he spoke for a third time, to ask him if he was okay, that Dane finally focused on him. On the other side of the service area a car had drawn up and a man was standing by the petrol pump, watching them. Toby glanced round at him, then back at Dane.

  ‘Do you want to come in?’ he asked.

  *

  It had been happening for a while, of course, the Dead-coming-back thing. Not often, but often enough. Nobody seemed to know why it had started, nor did there seem to be any particular rhyme or reason to who came back. In the beginning people tended to assume their return must mean something, that those who came back had left things unsaid or undone that they needed to set right. But after a while it became clear this was not the case. Although a few of the Dead did want to return to the life they had known when they were alive, most did not, preferring instead to move on, leave behind wives and husban
ds, children and parents.

  For all the pain it caused there was no malice in this, no desire to harm or distress. Indeed for the most part the Dead seemed almost entirely uninterested in the repercussions of their presence. Instead they were just there: heavily, inconveniently there.

  *

  Once they were back inside, Toby offered Dane a seat in the corner behind the counter. He wasn’t crazy about having Dane there but it was better than leaving him out in the service area or standing near the food. His manager, Ahmed, would be pissed whatever happened but at least this way he could argue he’d put him somewhere the customers were less likely to see him.

  Not, of course, that they wouldn’t know what he was if they did. Like all the Dead, Dane’s body seemed unable to shed the rigor of the grave, meaning his every action had a jerking quality, a quality that in Dane’s case was underlined by the angry line of the ligature beneath his jaw and the unnatural angle of his head upon his neck.

  Nor was it just about his pallor or his neck. Last summer, riding home after a party, Toby had seen one of the Dead in a park, standing quietly just out of the reach of the streetlights. He hadn’t seen her face, but he knew at once from the way she stood, the passive waitingness of it, that she was Dead.

  He hadn’t been frightened that night. In fact, as he coasted past he had looked back, struck by a feeling he couldn’t name, something more like yearning, or sadness.

  He wasn’t sure Dane made him feel like that, exactly. Yet it was difficult to avoid the sense that Dane had come loose from whatever held him to his former life, that however much he tried he was no longer part of it, of this. And, as the customers came and went, he could see they felt it as well. One by one, they started, or did double takes, some going so far as to place a hand over their hearts or mouths in surprise. The living Dane probably would have relished the response; now he seemed barely to notice it.

  Yet as the night wore on Toby began to wonder if there wasn’t something more to it. Dane himself might not want anything, but his presence, the unwanting thereness of it, weighed upon him, made him uncomfortable. It was as if just by being there Dane demanded something of him, something Toby had no idea how to give. Once or twice he glanced across at him, expecting to find Dane looking his way, but he never was. Instead he sat staring off into space, his eyes fixed on some invisible point in the middle distance.

  Nor was making conversation any easier. Dane never spoke unless spoken to, and even when he did his replies were halting, distracted, meaning any exchange sputtered out almost as soon as it began.

  Of course Dane hadn’t been much of a talker when he was alive, either. But this was different. Now his silence made Toby so uncomfortable and frustrated that it was almost a relief when, just before dawn, Dane stood and, after hesitating for a moment, shuffled out from behind the counter towards the door.

  Rising, Toby hurried after him.

  ‘Dane?’ he said, first once and then again, louder this time.

  In front of him Dane stopped.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Dane didn’t answer. For a moment Toby thought about reaching out, taking hold of his arm, but he didn’t.

  ‘Will you be back?’

  This time Dane hesitated, then shrugged.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘maybe.’ Then, turning away again, he headed out across the service area and away into the soft grey of the pre-dawn light.

  *

  Toby had been at home the week before when Dane’s father rang. He heard his mother answer, then she was at his door, the phone clasped to her chest.

  Afterwards he opened his computer, pulled up Facebook. People were already leaving messages on Dane’s profile, little notes of shock or grief saying things like ‘I’m crying for you, Dane’ and ‘Sometimes the world is just too sad,’ or just lines of hearts and little pictograms. He knew he should have written something, if only because he had known Dane the longest, but as he watched the messages appear, one after another, the things he wanted to say all seemed somehow to miss the point, to be too weak, too obvious.

  They hadn’t been friends, of course, not really, not for a while. Indeed as he sat there in his room with the computer he found he couldn’t remember the last time they’d spoken properly. Now he thought about it, he wasn’t sure when he’d last seen Dane having a proper conversation with anybody. It wasn’t that Dane was mopey or weird or angry, though he was all those things. It was that he was so obviously in pain, and that was just too difficult to deal with.

  *

  When he woke up that afternoon he called Mav. When Toby told him about the night before, Mav whistled.

  ‘No way,’ he said. ‘For real?’

  Hearing Mav speak, Toby felt suddenly uneasy, the events of last summer reasserting themselves.

  ‘For real.’

  ‘Are you on again tonight? I have to see this.’

  Afterwards he wondered why he had called Mav instead of somebody who had known Dane a little better. Had he thought Mav would be impressed? Or was it just that he thought Mav understood the strangeness that sometimes came with night shifts at the service station, the way the gap between the fluorescent light and plastic surfaces within and the sodium-tinted dark without could combine to make the world seem both too real and oddly distant, as if one had fallen unexpectedly out of sleep into sudden wakefulness.

  Either way, the result was that at ten, when Dane appeared on the edge of the light again, Mav was seated inside with Toby. Seeing Dane shuffle into view he stood and gave a low whistle.

  ‘Where do you reckon he’s been all day?’ he asked. ‘Do they go back underground or something?’

  Toby remembered the Dead woman in the park, her quiet presence in the shade of the trees when he went back the next day, the way she had seemed part of that green. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Perhaps.’

  As Dane approached, Toby wrinkled his nose. The night before Dane had smelt of earth and hospital, the close reek of the dirt mingling with the medicinal tang of disinfectant and surgical soap, but there was a new note to it now, something sweet and slightly foul.

  As Dane drew near Mav grinned and nodded his head as he did when appraising a car or a girl he admired.

  ‘Hey, Dane,’ he said.

  Dane stopped and jerked his head around. ‘Mav,’ he said, his voice coming loose and rasping from his ruined windpipe.

  *

  When Toby started work at the servo the summer before, neither he nor Dane had ever really spoken to Mav. A year ahead of them at school, the captain of the rugby team, Mav would usually have looked straight through both of them, which meant Toby was surprised when he turned up for his first shift and found Mav working behind the counter in the Mountain Bean Café (‘Real Coffee! Real Baristas!’) that occupied the other half of the building.

  That first night Toby was more absorbed with trying not to mess up the intricacies of the register and the toilet checks and cash drops than the question of what he would say to Mav when or if he had to speak to him, which is why he was surprised when, at around eleven, Mav appeared at the counter.

  ‘You’re Toby, right?’ he’d asked, and when Toby told him he was he shook his head, grinned, and said, ‘Welcome to the crappiest job in town.’

  Toby never deluded himself into thinking Mav would seek out his company if they weren’t stuck working together. But as the weeks passed it became a sort of habit, and on those nights the two of them were both rostered on Mav would usually drop past and waste an hour or two with Toby before heading home or out to meet his mates. It wasn’t friendship exactly, but as time passed Toby found himself coming to enjoy the shared bullshit of his company. There was something cheerfully uncaring about Mav, a casual arrogance that made him surprisingly easy to be with.

  Then, a month or so after he started working at the station, Toby heard the sound of skateboard wheels bumping in across the service area. Beside him, Mav made a face.

  ‘Jesus. Look at this loser.’
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  Seeing it was Dane, Toby got to his feet in surprise.

  ‘What?’ Mav asked. ‘You know him?’

  Toby hesitated for a moment.

  Mav snorted in disbelief. ‘No skateboards!’ he said.

  Dane glanced around, then, placing one foot on his board, flicked it up and caught it. For a long moment he’d stood staring at Mav, then turning, had looked at Toby and said, ‘Hey.’

  Toby didn’t know why he’d come: the two of them hadn’t really spoken for the last year or so. Exactly why wasn’t clear to Toby. When he was with Dane it was impossible to escape the feeling Dane felt Toby was missing some bar Dane had set, not giving enough or pushing hard enough; yet however hard Toby tried, Dane would just lift the bar higher, until one day it just seemed too hard, and Toby stopped trying.

  Yet when Dane walked in that night it was as if none of that had ever happened, and so, even with Mav there, it didn’t take them long to fall back into the rhythm they had always had when they were alone together.

  After that night it became a routine: every Friday and Saturday night at around ten Dane would coast his skateboard to the doors and step off it with a practised flick. If Toby was serving Dane would pause by the magazines or flip through the CDs on the counter, lingering over the ones called things like Death Metal Madness Vol 6, until eventually the customers left and Toby was able to talk.

  Looking back, Toby realised he didn’t really remember what they talked about, or even whether they talked much at all. Dane was often distracted, and the constant flow of customers meant it was difficult to have a proper conversation, but in a weird way that seemed to make the whole thing easier, almost as if the interruptions kept Dane from focusing for too long on any one thing, or from trying to push Toby about this or that.

  All the same, Toby couldn’t have said he wanted Dane there. Although he was pretty certain Ahmed didn’t check the CCTV footage all that often, he’d made a big deal about friends not being welcome when Toby did his training, and the one time Ahmed had caught Dane there he’d asked Toby the sort of pointed questions about who Dane was and what he was doing hanging around that made it clear he suspected Dane was more than just some blow-in on a skateboard.