‘I have proper directions now,’ he said. ‘So I know where we’re going.’
The drive seemed slower now that my father had directions and I didn’t have to look anxiously at the blank trees, illuminated by the headlights, passing us by on the side of the road. When we slowed and turned into my mother’s driveway my father said, ‘This is it?’ in a dissatisfied way.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
Our house was in a clearing cut out of the bush. It had corrugated-iron sides and, I noticed, looking at it now, resembled a shed. Inside were hardwood floors that had been laid over concrete. All the lights in the house were turned on. My father drove around the side of the house and parked in the backyard, beside the swimming pool.
‘Let me give you some money,’ he said, taking his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Instead of a present. So you can go get yourself something.’
He held out a fifty-dollar note and I stared at it for a second before taking it and pushing it into my pocket.
‘Just be sure to tell me what you bought, the next time we speak on the phone.’
My mother was standing at the sliding door at the side of the house. She raised her hand. My father got out of the car and I followed. The air smelled richly of eucalyptus. I followed a few steps behind my father. The packed-dirt driveway ran all the way up to the door where my mother was standing.
‘Hello, Teresa,’ my father said.
My mother nodded once with her back straightened. A look of concern moved across the surface of her face. She smiled.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Evan said you were coming.’
My father looked at me, then at the house. He took in the walls and the roof and then insides of the house, as much as he could see past my mother in the doorway.
‘This place isn’t bad, is it?’ he said.
‘Come inside,’ my mother said. ‘You must be exhausted.’
‘One minute.’
My mother put her arm around me and kissed me on the cheek, then we both watched my father walk around the side of the house. With his hand he tested the strength of the piping that ran from the gutter on the roof to the large concrete tank beside the house. Once he was satisfied that it was secure, he walked over and looked into the dark water of the swimming pool.
‘The pool could use a clean,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want to swim in that.’
‘We rarely use it at the moment,’ my mother said.
‘You just need to clean it once, then it’s easy to maintain. Your boyfriend should know that. Where’s your pool cover?’
My mother shrugged and walked inside and my father and I followed. There was a pot of soup on the stove and dishes piled in the kitchen sink. My mother’s dressing-gown was lying on the couch. Usually, at this time of the night, she’d be wearing it, but instead she was dressed in a wool skirt and shirt. She’d also tied her hair back.
‘You look nice,’ my father said.
‘Thank you,’ my mother said.
She had her arms crossed and my father reached out and gently touched her elbow, once. He cleared his throat and then he looked over at me.
‘Evan, do you mind getting your bag?’ he said.
I walked out into the night and opened the door to the back seat of the car. The light inside the car came on. I put my bag over my shoulder and it made me feel off balance. I wasn’t used to its weight.
Inside, in the warm glow of the kitchen, my father was talking quietly to my mother. She was looking at the floor and nodding. They both looked very serious. My father was talking very quickly and holding my mother’s elbow again. I picked up the umbrella from the back seat, closed the door, then scraped it across all the pretty black paint on the side of my father’s car. The noise made me wince. I could hear the side door opening. I scraped another line, this time heading back in the other direction. The sound was worse. I ignored it.
Room
Room 805 was an average-looking room. One double bed, a desk, a chair, a thick shelf with a radio built into it like the dashboard of a car. Unlike the hallway outside, where the carpet was a deep red, the floor inside the room was a sickly off-white. The lamp beside the desk was the only light in the room that was turned on. At first this had been a problem, but it helped set the mood. There was a sliding glass door that led out to a small balcony. He had been instructed to keep this door closed at all times. Outside there were the lights of the surrounding office buildings and numbers, lit up in yellow, on the face of a large digital clock on the roof of a skyscraper. Down in the street were the tail-lights of cars and also a church, the orange spotlights around it making the sandstone brick walls glow. He tapped his fingers on the desk, in time with a tune only he could hear.
She came up at seven, holding a purse. He told her he’d only been waiting for ten minutes, but really he’d been there for half the day preparing. He’d taken off his shoes and they were sitting together neatly at the foot of the bed.
‘Maybe some music?’ she said.
‘You can try the radio,’ he said. ‘But I’m pretty sure it’s busted.’
The wiring in the radio had been tampered with earlier so there would be no other sounds in the room apart from their voices. He looked nervous, but talking seemed to help calm the quiver in his voice. Now and then he’d rub at his right eye. He coughed once into his fist while they stood there looking at each other.
‘I’d love a drink,’ she said.
‘I ordered a bottle, it’s on its way up.’
He cast a quick glance at the mirror on the wall opposite the bed, which he’d been told to try to avoid. She put her purse down on the bed. She was pretty and wearing a dress that looked new. It showed off her figure. She was wearing make-up, but not too much.
I had never seen the dress before. The image of her standing there beside the bed was caught and broken down into millions of tiny squares and sent through an optical cable and placed back in order onto the monitor that was sitting in front of me. For a second the image spiked and I adjusted the connection by hitting the side of the monitor. I had been following her for months, mainly just watching her through the zoom lens of a camera pointed through the wound-down window of my car and listening to her voice through a tap in her phone line. She only ever called the members of her family. Her mother was sick. Her sister was there with them but her father wasn’t coping well; he’d let the plants die. She didn’t have many friends.
She worked as an administrative assistant in a law firm in the city. She went to yoga classes every Thursday night. Did most of her shopping at a health food store a couple of streets away from her house. In her fridge she had leftover meals in containers, their contents marked by masking tape, bitten at and torn rather than cut with scissors, and written on in black felt-tip pen. As far as I could tell her only vices were store-bought orange juice (neither low fat nor low GI) and a half-empty bottle of vodka in the freezer. There was also a packet of cigarettes in one of the drawers, but this seemed to be for sentimental reasons more than anything else. Not once had I seen her light one.
It was a relief to see her in the dress, showing off her figure, because I was worried that she had been apprehensive about the whole encounter.
There was a knock at the door and I adjusted my headphones and toyed with the sound levels to smooth out a small patch of distortion. I had installed three cameras in the main room – one directly behind the mirror, another in the top corner inside the smoke detector, and one more looking down on the room from a light fitting, so the entire room could be seen – and one in the bathroom, poking out of a small hole I had hammered into the wall. There were seven microphones, one in every light fitting and one inside the lamp beside the bed. I could hear the room better than they could. I could see her from the back and the front, depending on whic
h monitor I was looking at. She turned to look at herself in the mirror and adjusted her dress while he went to answer the door. The image of her in front of me was in colour but slightly washed out. If the light caught her skin in the right way, it looked blue.
Due to an internal investigation that had started a month previously, there was also a monitor off to the side that showed the hotel room next door to theirs, room 804, where I was sitting with my colleague L and being recorded. I stared at the back of my head as it looked at a monitor that projected the back of my head, and onwards and onwards, falling down into infinity.
He gave the guy at the door a ten-dollar note and carried the champagne bottle in its silver ice basin over to the bed. I could hear the ice cubes as they clinked against each other. It made my teeth hurt. He had been getting to know her for almost two weeks. They had met at yoga class; he had told her that his name was Michael but it wasn’t really. He had taken her out to dinner twice. At first we were going to put a wire on him, just in case she whispered something into his ear and we missed it. He was dressed in a shirt and tie. He had told her that he was an investment banker, something that was suitably of no interest to anybody. He had refused to wear the wire. He’d said even the idea of it made him nervous.
‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said now, in the room, and gestured towards the bed.
She sat on the corner of the mattress and looked around. Her eyes were lined and her lips were red. She looked at the lamp. It gave off an orange light.
‘This lamp is strange,’ she said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘The décor, it doesn’t suit the rest of the room.’
‘I hadn’t noticed,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
He poured champagne into one of the long-stemmed glasses that had come with the bottle. He overfilled it and foam spilled over the edge of the glass and the wet sound of it hitting the carpet made me feel slightly ill.
‘Oops,’ he said.
She wasn’t watching. She was propped up on the bed by her elbows. I found her disinterest in him attractive. I had looked through her chest of drawers and lifted and smelled each item of clothing. She kept the sweaters she would never wear in the drawer that was the second from the bottom. A photo of her and her sister had been tucked into the tight gap between the mirror on top of the chest of drawers and its frame. I had made sure I folded everything back perfectly. I had taken off my gloves only twice, once to touch her pillow, and again to run my finger down the glass door of her shower. Her house was spotless and smelled of her perfume.
He handed her a glass of champagne, the one that hadn’t overflowed.
‘It’s a shame the radio doesn’t work,’ she said.
‘Yes. It’s a real shame.’
‘Maybe you should call the front desk.’
‘I don’t want them to think I broke it,’ he said.
‘You broke it?’
‘No, but that’s what it’ll seem like. Either the person before me broke it or ignored it and I’ll ignore it, and then the next person in this room will probably ignore it.’
‘And so on and so on into infinity,’ she said.
There was a not uncomfortable pause. He leaned against the desk with his hand and drank, perhaps a little too quickly. I watched his Adam’s apple move in his throat.
‘I never like to think about that,’ she said. ‘I mean about how many people have been in the hotel room and what they’ve done. The idea of all the conversations that have happened here, whether or not they’ve changed anything, makes me feel kind of sick. Then there’s everything they’ve touched. Once, when we were on holiday, my parents took us on this underground cave tour and the tour guide used his torch to point out a stalagmite that had been ruined from everyone touching it over time. Just from the oil from their hands. It’s horrible what a body can do, even when it’s not trying.’
I was tapping a pen between my fingers. My colleague L was sitting silently beside me, doing a crossword on the back page of a newspaper. He was leaning on the back two legs of his chair and every now and then he’d ask, without looking up, if she’d got her tits out yet. I was starting to worry. I had noticed that the image of myself on the monitor in front of me had started to do things a second before I did them. The image of me moved its hand up to run its fingers through its hair then I followed it, like an echo. The image of me turned around and looked directly at me, almost quizzically, and I turned my head to check out if the camera was still working. I decided not to mention anything about this to L.
‘Each room is cleaned though,’ he was telling her. ‘Thoroughly.’ Then he paused, took a breath and said, ‘But you shouldn’t be worrying about something like that,’ in such a tone that they both knew what he was talking about.
She smirked at him and raised an eyebrow and he said, too quickly, ‘You know, you look kind of tired,’ which neatly tore the moment in half.
She emptied her glass with a throwback of her head and placed it on the bedside table, next to the lamp. One of her rings caught the rim of the glass and there was a slight chime. I was falling for her, which I was trying to keep a handle on, though sometimes she did mundane things that made me giddy. The headphones I was wearing covered my ears, but the room would lapse into such a silence that now and then I could only hear the creaking of L’s chair as he rocked slowly back and forth.
In the room he moved a little from side to side and it was easy to see that he didn’t know where to go next. Sitting next to her on the bed would be awkward. He leaned across the front of her body and kissed her on the mouth. I turned up the volume to hear better.
My image on the monitor put its head down to write something and then continued to watch the monitor in front of it. I tried to make out the words before writing them down on the legal pad in front of me. The gaps between my image on the monitor doing something and me following its lead were getting longer. This was something I was trying to ignore.
In the room he said, ‘You’re shaking.’
‘It’s cold in here.’
‘I’m sorry, I forgot about the air conditioning.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said, looking off to the side, straight at the camera. ‘I had a dream last night about my bedroom, in fact I was in my bed asleep, dreaming about being in bed. Running along one of my walls is a cupboard with mirrored doors, and I dreamed that there was someone inside with the door just slid open a crack. So they were staring at me, it was a man, and I could see his face and it wasn’t an ugly face and it wasn’t a beautiful face, it was just plain and calm. I think that made it worse.’
‘Probably,’ he said gently, sounding confused.
She smiled and picked up her purse. ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘I’ll be right back,’ and she stood up and kissed him quickly again and walked towards the bathroom. Her hips swayed as she walked.
‘I’ll just make myself comfortable,’ he said and when her back was turned he looked at the mirror and gave the camera – or me, really – a wink.
She kept a shoebox under her bed. The first thing I noticed about it was that unlike everything else under there – magazines in piles, a few pairs of shoes, a flat plastic box filled with ski wear – the shoebox was completely free of dust. Inside it were photographs of her and various men in pornographic positions. Most of the photos were of men tied to her bed frame with different coloured silk scarves, the same scarf never appeared twice, and neither did any of the men. There were a few photos of her naked, but with a scarf wrapped tightly around her head, showing the hollow dents of her eyes and the soft pyramid of her nose.
She stood and looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She pulled lightly at her face with a forefinger and thumb and stretched her cheeks out. It looked like her face was made of clay. In the bedroom he was reclined on the bed, his shoes still on the fl
oor, his arms bent at triangles so that his fingers could twine themselves together at the back of his head. He seemed relaxed; his toes were twitching in time to, I guessed, the same tune his fingers had tapped out before. She was breathing deeply in the bathroom, but she looked calm. When I turned up the volume on the bathroom microphone I could hear that she was talking to herself. I turned the dial up even more until there were pops and cracks and I caught her voice repeating; ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.’ There was a flash of something thin and metallic in her purse which her fingers rearranged. The purse snapped shut. I had forgotten to turn the volume down and as she left the closing of the bathroom door resonated in my headphones like a gunshot. On the monitor of the room I was sitting in, the image of me was scrambling to pull its headphones off and L had gotten up so fast to run to the door that he accidentally knocked over his chair.
Giraffe
My girlfriend’s uncle shows me a photo album filled mostly with naked pictures of his ex-wives. He’s been divorced four times now so there’s a lot of photographs. Rachel has stepped outside to take a phone call; as soon as she walked out the door her uncle called me over and pulled the album down from the top shelf of his only bookcase. I want Rachel to come back. Her uncle flips the pages without saying anything. I am half-sure that she is outside talking to her lover; I’m still not sure he exists, but I’ve been obsessing over him for weeks.
‘Well Chris,’ he says. ‘What do you think of that?’
I’m quiet for a second. It’s an interesting question because I don’t actually know what to think. The photographs are tastefully done, lots of the women are posed quite well and artfully looking off into the distance. There are a few landscapes thrown in there for good measure, as a break from the naked women, and also three photographs of a giraffe in an enclosure at a zoo. I tell him that he seems to have a pretty good command of light.
We Are Not The Same Anymore Page 9