Soon

by Lois Murphy

  I empty Alex’s bucket and rinse it out in the laundry. When I return with strong, hot tea she is quieter, lying against the back of the couch as if drained. She looks as if she has been washed up on an ocean shore, left sprawled by the waves. She gives me a soft, very weak smile.

  The worst is over. Outside the crooning is dying down, overwhelmed now by commercials for furniture outlets and soap operas. The curtains are starting to glow with early morning light – I move to the corner of the room and kill the TV.

  We sit sipping our tea in the gathering silence, the time of day once full of the chorus of birds greeting the dawn.

  Alex closes her eyes again and gives a long sigh. ‘Thank God you found me,’ she says. ‘It would have shredded me out there.’ I start at her choice of words, evoking the image of the blue hat torn to pieces. There is a sense that my dream was a shared vision, but this awareness comes shrouded with a disturbing sense of trespass, intrusion.

  ‘You look like you had a rough night.’ She shakes her head and raises her hand to her hair. Her pendant hangs crookedly from one collarbone. ‘Is it always like that?’

  ‘Actually, no – I have to admit that last night was worse than usual, much more intense.’

  ‘That was me,’ she says quietly, matter-of-factly. ‘It got in through me – I was channelling it. I just couldn’t seem to shut it out. Did you have dreams?’

  My face is an admission. She lets her head fall back again. ‘It can’t physically get through the barriers of the house, but I was a psychic opening, it got in that way. Were your dreams bad?’

  ‘Worst I think I’ve ever had.’

  ‘Anything coherent?’

  I shrug. ‘Not really. More like collage, just disjointed images.’

  ‘Write them down, remember as much of them as you can. It’s very important, don’t dismiss anything as random.’

  I’m taken aback by her energy as she says this. ‘You dreamt too.’

  She winces. ‘Not in the true sense.’ She is draining of colour again. ‘Unfortunately, I was awake the whole time.’ Without warning she throws off her blanket and stumbles from the room. I watch the outside light filtering through the curtained windows and listen to the sound of her retching over the kitchen sink.

  I’m sitting outside on the porch watching Gina shuffle around the trunks of the acacias by the front fence when Alex emerges, smelling of my shampoo. She is drowning in one of my T-shirts. I hadn’t acknowledged before how small she is. As she lowers herself onto the step beside me, I’m disconcerted by the scents of the shampoo and the clean shirt – unnerving to smell yourself on another person. It’s been a very long time since I experienced such an intimate sensation; it’s strangely disorientating.

  Alex has a bit more colour, but still looks ill. Her eyes are faded within dark pits, and when I pass her a coffee cup her hands quiver. The colour has leeched from her lips, as though it has drained into the deep lines etched around her mouth. She winces when I offer her the tobacco.

  The autumn sun has reached the porch, although it is still too early for it to contain much warmth. Still, its touch is comforting, and the gentle breeze enlivens the morning’s stillness. Sometimes I think I’ll never get used to the absent birds.

  Beside me Alex watches a clutch of clouds unravel overhead, sipping at her coffee with distraction.

  ‘It’s amazing how peaceful it seems now,’ she says. ‘As if last night was just some kind of awful dream. It’s like waking up sober after a big night.’

  ‘It takes a while to get used to,’ I tell her, ‘like seasickness, the lurch between the days and the nights. It used to be like this all the time.’ I wave my hand to indicate the sunlight dappling through the dancing leaves, the dog with her nose in a small shrub – a conjuror presenting his revelation: Behold!

  But before us is the abandoned Land Cruiser, skewed where I’d stalled it, doors still hanging open to commemorate our undignified flight the evening before.

  Behind us in the house the phone rings. Three times, stops.

  It’s Milly, worried. Li rang her this morning and said I’d taken off without a word or my supplies. She’d waited till dark for me to return with the truck, then when she phoned I’d sounded demented and wouldn’t talk. She hadn’t rung Milly last night in case she’d risk going out in the dark to check on me. I tell her I had a pretty close call but I’m okay. Her voice is breathy with relief.

  ‘Bloody men,’ she says. ‘You all think you’re invincible.’

  ‘Unassailable,’ I say.

  ‘Ridiculous!’

  ‘Deluded.’

  She’s chuckling. She was obviously pretty frightened by Li’s call. I tell her she’s cooking tonight, I’ll bring Li and maybe one other round later.

  ‘One other? A visitor? You’re entertaining? How decadent!’

  I’m feeling better now; Milly always restores me. She is the sort of person who keeps you in perspective, with her subdued manner that belies an intoxicating vein of wryness. She’s the sort of person who would have made jokes to her classes in Latin, which they would never understand, yet they would remember her with nostalgia as their funniest teacher.

  I bait her now, refusing to tell her anything. She becomes dignified and crafty, trying to hook me with casual mentions of scones, perhaps a banana cake?

  I hang up grinning and return to the porch. ‘That was Milly.’

  Alex turns to me, her face ashen like a death shroud. ‘I know.’

  I can’t persuade Alex to stay on and recover, or even to come and meet Milly and Li. All the torment she endured during the night seems to have reclaimed her since Milly’s call, and her movements are slight and careful, as if any motion causes her pain. She refuses to tell me anything.

  When we arrive at the dam her car is undisturbed, parked under the stand of gums by the picnic table and the defunct barbie, her bags still piled in the back seat. Her battery is flat; it’s a small matter to jump-start it. While it charges we wander towards the rim of the dam.

  ‘I don’t like the idea of you leaving today,’ I tell her. ‘You look bloody awful, truth be told.’

  ‘Thanks very much.’ Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. ‘I’ll only go as far as Woodford, I’ll get a room there for a night or two. I couldn’t spend another night here.’

  ‘You sound like Liz.’

  That pulls her up. ‘I am Liz,’ she says obscurely. ‘I know now what she went through. She looked outside, towards it, and it got her. It got to her through her kids, through what mattered to her. I lived through something similar last night.’

  We have reached the picnic table by the water’s edge, and she lowers herself onto its bench in the careful manner of an old woman. As always, I expect a crow to flop purposefully onto the ground from the gums, eyes greedy for an opportunity. It’s funny how the absence of things so familiar that they seem inconsequential can make a whole scene wrong.

  Alex’s stranded look is back, as though she’s spent the night at sea fighting to stay afloat, and is now sprawled on the deck of morning without the energy for anything more than recognition of her survival. But she insists on leaving. I have no choice.

  I offer her my tobacco and she shakes her head. I feel like a cop about to interview a witness, which gives me pause; it’s not the approach I wish to take. But Alex steps into the delay herself.

  ‘Promise me you’ll get out of here.’

  ‘I hope so. One day.’

  ‘Not one day. One day will be too late.’ She will not look at me.

  ‘Tell me.’

  She scrapes at a bubble of old paint on the table. ‘There’s not much I can tell you, really. It was all very jumbled, chaotic.’

  ‘But you said you were an opening? You actually experienced the mist?’

  ‘To a degree. It got into the peripheral parts of my psyche – it’s hard to explain. I had to keep it shut out of my essence, so to speak, or I wouldn’t be here now. That’s what was such a struggle, like wrestlin
g with an octopus. God, it all sounds so flaky.’ She reaches for the tobacco, then puts it down again with a wince. ‘It was more like a long, disjointed dream. It’s difficult to interpret straight off.’

  ‘But did you get any idea about what it is, where it’s coming from?’

  ‘To a degree.’ She shivers. ‘Not really. I’ve never come across anything like this before. I think, though, that it’s human.’

  ‘Human?’

  ‘In a sense. It seems to be made up of human nature. It’s hard to explain because I don’t really understand it myself. You know how elderly people can start behaving oddly when they lose their marbles – vicars’ wives start flashing their knickers, or old men who have been perfectly harmless all their lives suddenly start getting sleazy? The part of their brain that restrained them, socially, breaks down in dementia, and they become uninhibited, uncontrollable. That’s the impression I have of what’s here – it’s human nature unfettered, unrestrained.’

  ‘Jesus. Like this?’

  Alex shrugs. ‘I’m not a philosopher. But I’ve seen into a lot of minds and there are always – no matter how admirable the person – closed-off areas, dark corners. The old cliché of skeletons in the closet. It’s all very Freudian, but who’s to say that these Pandora’s boxes aren’t our true selves, that our visible personalities aren’t just social veneer? Look at the world at large and tell me that humans live for virtue, compassion and the common good. The old saying “It’s only wrong if you get caught” pretty much sums it up.’

  ‘So you’re saying that the mist is a result of our corruption? Like a by-product?’

  ‘Look, I don’t know, I really don’t. But you said the area that brought those men here was a scene of bloodshed, slaughter over a claim – greed. The men were anonymous, formal, unseeing. Removed.’ Her brow is furrowed; she squints into the morning sun, which beams down on us comfort and warmth.

  ‘Look, I’m guessing. What I went through last night was a sequence of foulness, it was like evil, pure and simple. Cruelty, and delight in cruelty. Have you ever seen that Goya print, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters? It’s as though what tormented him, led him to create that powerful image, is loose here, from the same pool.’

  I knew the picture well. Gina and I first met at a gallery. We’d both aspired to be creative in a previous life.

  ‘But Goya was deaf and going mad, surely his demons were private?’

  ‘How can you be sure? He lived through a pretty turbulent part of human history.’ She bends to pick up a spray of gum leaves, then twirls it as if spinning her thoughts into some kind of order. ‘You know, last night I saw what Liz had experienced, her kids devouring their brother alive. And while it seems so extreme, that type of thing can be traced back to antiquity, through our whole history, our belief systems. Mythology, religion – stories of cannibalism and torture abound. And the present, too – the things that are being done to children in parts of Africa, incomprehensible cruelty. It’s all there in our daily existence, but for us it’s always been at a remove.’

  Beside us, the true depth of the dam is concealed by the reflections of the sky and the trees veneered onto its surface by the morning light. The surface of the water is tormented by the growing wind; the reflections career out of shape, warp and distort.

  Alex kneels down and dips her spray of leaves into the dam.

  ‘There are places where psychic energy is high, areas on certain junctions of landmasses. The Grampians in Victoria are one – there’re always lots of UFO sightings there.’ She catches my look. ‘Don’t be like that. UFOs are unidentified, that’s all. “Unidentified” means unrecognised, not non-existent.’ She stands and turns back towards the car. ‘But there are places, too, where something terrible has happened, where the energy from the trauma has stayed on. The classic haunted-house syndrome. Am I losing you?’

  She isn’t. It’s bewildering, none of it adequately explained, but in a strange way it all makes sense.

  Her car’s engine has been running smoothly for nearly ten minutes. I switch it off, then restart it: it fires instantly, the battery restored. The drive to Woodford should have it fully charged. ‘I wish you’d come and talk to Milly, just for an hour. It would be a great help.’

  Her reaction is surprising, her ‘No!’ vehement. I step away from her car door. She pauses to wind down the window. On the dashboard is a piece of paper with my address and phone number, with instructions to ring three times first. She turns back to me.

  ‘Thank you, one last time. I owe you.’

  ‘Just send me back my T-shirt – it’s one of my favourites.’ Her smile almost reaches her eyes this time.

  ‘And if you could tell us anything at all …’

  Her smile is instantly gone, and she looks at me with that unnerving stare of hers, the penetrative gaze from the night before.

  ‘One thing I can tell you, without doubt, is that you have to get away.’ She reaches and grasps my hand. ‘By solstice. But promise me you won’t wait till then. Please. If you’re not out by then it’ll be too late. It’s the only thing I know for certain.’

  At home, I regret not insisting that I escort her to Woodford. I can only hope that she will be okay. She has promised to ring as soon as she gets to the motel.

  The house reeks of cigarette smoke. The first thing I do is throw open the doors and windows, before sitting outside in the fresh air to light one up. The air around me seems to hum with absence now; strange how less than ten hours of acquaintance can leave such a void. It’s the isolation of my existence – any contact, however minimal, assumes importance. So that now my home suddenly seems empty, the couch pointedly uninhabited and the kitchen vacant. The cups left to drain on the sink assume a ridiculous poignancy, a sentimental still life of loss. I put them away, out of sight.

  I understand now how raw the silence of Rolf’s last days must have seemed. To have that sudden, unexpected intimacy, to have youth and the suggestion of family roll into the twilight of a solitary life, and then to be left behind, the empty house next door like a shrine. Only the sound of his breathing to accompany him through the long hours; the companionship of children’s laughter replaced by encroaching weeds.

  I hadn’t realised before that I was lonely.

  The pain is back in my stomach again. I massage it ineffectively with one hand and stroke Gina’s ears with the other. I need to get back into shape, start looking after myself.

  I need, as they say, to get a life. It’s just over eight weeks till the winter solstice, now known, à la Alex, as D-day. I haven’t got a hope of persuading Milly and Li to leave all that they have left within eight weeks. So if Alex knows what she’s talking about – and it seemed the one thing that she was sure of – I’m effectively screwed.

  One day at a time. For now I need a beer. I stir myself off the porch and go in search of my car keys, Alex’s final word to me floating in my wake like the remnants of a bad dream. Four tiny letters, barely a sigh of a word, but with the same terrible essence of threat as something unknown standing behind you in the dark.

  Soon.

  PART

  THREE

  I decide to leave the car at home and jog to town to collect Li’s truck, much to Gina’s delight. She trots patiently alongside my stumbling gait, veering off on random scent trails with her tongue lolling.

  I’m in far worse shape than I thought, and I’m wheezing, barely able to breathe, when I finally reach the truck. It’s time to seriously consider giving up the fags. I flop onto the kerb, propped with my head on my knees for a minute, until my heartbeat’s finally less outlandish, and then I give in and subside onto my back on the overgrown nature strip and gasp. It’s a shameful spectacle. There are some advantages to an empty town.

  Above me the clouds merge to form creatures both known and fantastical, and I wonder how many years – decades? – it’s been since I just lay on my back and enjoyed their show. It’s been so long now since I’ve credited anything from na
ture with innocence.

  It doesn’t take long for thoughts like these to seep into the surroundings, and under their influence the benign puffs of cloud start to seethe and transform. One that had been merely fluff, holding all the threat of a woolly poodle, suddenly tears at one end, adding to its form a gaping wound, shards of cloud along its edges jagged like teeth. The others swirl around it as if dancing in mockery.

  My dream. It’s time to go. I’m already thinking about a cigarette.

  Li is sitting on her steps after a morning’s pruning when I chug the truck in. There is a trace of anxiety in her eyes, but she looks rested now. While I load my supplies onto the back of the truck, explaining my rush of the day before, she makes egg sandwiches and we eat them on the porch steps, watching the dogs wrestle happily. Soon it will be too cold to sit outside, our confinement will be almost total.

  The house doesn’t seem as empty when she drops me back home, and I’m surrounded by my bags of shopping. I offer to come and collect her later, chauffeur her to Milly’s, but she laughs and slaps her hand on the driver’s door of the truck, saying she’ll come in the piece of crap. I am not surprised or offended by this; it is part of Li’s character that she will always choose independence over comfort. As she drives away, she is singing to Blackie, who runs in excited circles on the truck tray. His barks echo into the quiet afternoon.