Almost a Mirror

by Kirsten Krauth

  ALMOST

  A MIRROR

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  First published 2020

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 Kirsten Krauth

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design: Josh Durham, Design by Committee

  Graphic text: Elizabeth Geddes

  Typeset in 12.5/18pt Adobe Garamond by Cannon Typesetting

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia at www.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-1-925760-56-9

  For Finn

  I’ve never found growing up to be straight and linear … it’s been quite a zigzag, fixing one hole and then springing a leak somewhere else.

  Ben Folds

  TDK D180 – SIDE A

  CHANGE IN MOOD

  Melbourne, 1984

  Mum has your photos framed in the hallway and I’m lost somewhere in the darkness. I can see me there but not in the places you’d expect.

  Sometimes you come in too close because you want to see my eyes.

  Sensing.

  You make me look like a statue coming to life. My arms and legs are marble. My hair and lipstick stand out because they’re not the real colour.

  In the photos in the hallway you’ve ripped off parts of me so I’m missing bits of my body.

  You never speak much as you move through the studio.

  Mum sits in the back corner. She doesn’t look up after the first few minutes. When I started taking my clothes off for you, I was more shy about her.

  Sometimes in the bright my eyes hurt but it’s not so hard to work lying down. I get pocket money for my visits which Mum puts straight into the bank. I don’t like doing compound interest at school but I like seeing it in my bankbook.

  Twist your arm to the left.

  When you take photos your eyes are wide, but you don’t really look at me. You’ve got a big camera, so your face is often in shadow and all I can see is the space between us.

  Out of the camera comes a flickering stream of dusty gold light like at the movies. It’s pointed at me.

  That’s how I imagine it.

  Point your chin up towards the ceiling.

  You float along the walls and in and out, making your phantasies. That’s the word you use. You spelled it out for me. You let my mind wander in and out too because I have to stay so still.

  Waiting.

  I like the dark and quiet in this room.

  You’re playing classical music as we arrive and I try to take my uniform off without falling over. You talk about Mahler and Wagner but you always switch the music off just when I’m getting used to it.

  I asked you once if I could put on my Kids in the Kitchen tape but you turned and looked as if you’d lost something.

  If there’s a short easy word and a long hard word you always choose the word that I don’t understand.

  Now roll over and turn your head on the pillow. Pull your legs up.

  I’m a little girl sleeping, letting my knees fall away from the sky.

  Changing.

  I’m on top of the doona. It doesn’t have a cover because you like the soft swan colour.

  Trace your eyes along the wall to your left.

  You make my body black-and-white. It comes out of the picture sometimes and stays hidden when I want it to.

  I can feel the cool shadows touching my skin as I look up at the little room that drapes over the stairs. It’s a nest of soft lamps and books fly out of the shelves.

  I’ve never been up those stairs.

  Goosebumps cover my skin. I’ve never seen goosebumps in a photo. I wonder what they would look like close up. The dry bumps of the moon?

  I’m a girl lying on a beach. The bracelets around my wrists and ankles start to ache and I shift as my hand goes to sleep. I hit the pins and needles out with my other fist, at first funny bone and then not so funny. I watch the light flicker up above me, tracing my shape on the bed. I imagine Scott Carne staring back at me from the ceiling.

  I’m a girl diving into a pool. I have tanned legs and the purple lipstick Mum won’t let me wear. I can see my reflection in his mirrored sunglasses. When we touch I turn into a polaroid and fly out of his reach.

  I dive again to bring him back.

  I wish I was in my own room. Sometimes when you show me the photos I don’t even recognise it’s me. It’s a long way to come from home. When I see my body it’s still mine but it looks like something to hang on the wall.

  Changing.

  I let my belly hang out and close my eyes, opening them to see you bob your head up like a killer whale ready to dive.

  Gaze at that brick on your left and count to ten.

  Sometimes hours can go by like this as you swim towards me, surfacing now and again for air.

  I turn and settle inside my body. No thoughts in this space, wooden beams and shadowed like a church.

  Waiting.

  So focused that I stop blinking.

  SEND ME AN ANGEL

  Sydney, 2010

  Jimmy’s skipping heart has stopped but the remembering has begun. He remembers feeling bold and bright and slick and high in the night with the girl.

  But today it’s a cold-sliced grey. A day for forgetting.

  The walls are spotted with mould, meeting a ceiling about to collapse on them. Small heaps of baby clothes teeter like building blocks, the things Mona collects for her teaching projects lurk in small drawers, labelled corks, buttons, feathers, rocks, leaves.

  She keeps all the gifts the kids in her class buy her at Christmas. Handmade soaps and ornaments for the tree. He gets to eat the chocolates.

  Mona has set him up in the spare room because he always wakes her after his taxi shift, whisky breath, kebab juice. Too much information. It keeps her up, smothered in garlic waves. She needs uninterrupted sleep, she keeps saying, she keeps saying.

  Jimmy’s been sorting too, making way.

  The top of the cupboard now has only one box of his. A few unfinished short stories, journals, Mona’s letters and cards she made him, album covers, cassettes, a tape recorder, loose photos.

  The fires in the Blue Mountains have kept Jimmy up too. Emergency warning alerts on the phone. Beep. Houses lost. Beep. Dreams spent. Beep.

  He wonders if Nanna’s place in Springwood is still standing.

  He puts on his sunglasses and looks out onto the dusty redbrick wall of the house next door, not quite high enough to block the sun. Ants climb over the top.

  All the windows have lacy stockings of woven iron bars. Mona feels safe here but Jimmy wonders if there’s a fire how they’ll ever get out.

  He puts his pants on for work. No ironed creases like the other guys. Slacks.

  He avoids Mona in the kitchen and heads to the bathroom.

  He reaches for the light switch and can’t find it, scrambles his fingers on the other side of the door. He picks up the razor. It’s blunt because Mona always borrows it.

  She can’t reach her legs now.

  The grey hairs jut out from his chin, an opposing force to the black ones. We’re stronger than you, motherfuckers!

  Jimmy can’t be b
othered shaving. He can’t be bothered working, either.

  He’s late for his taxi shift. Where are his shoes?

  Coffee.

  Have you seen my …? It’s okay, found them.

  Mona stands at the kitchen bench where she always stands, pouring from the kettle. Her hair and skin have lost their colour, as if the baby is stealing from her. When she drinks her tea she sits backwards in the chair, legs wide like a truck driver.

  Jimmy opens each cupboard door and closes it, working his way along to find a cup.

  How long have you lived here? she asks.

  She never looks at him when he comes into the kitchen. Her busy hands. Washing rinsing peeling mashing kneading blending.

  She can get him to do anything with those hands.

  Jimmy wants them on his body but he turns away and makes the coffee.

  He opens the fridge and looks in it for answers.

  There’s no milk.

  The beeps go off for the pinprick and Mona sighs.

  When Mona first found out about the gestational diabetes she was afraid to inject her stomach, thought she was going to pierce the baby.

  Jimmy tried but his hands shook too much and Mona said the last thing she needed was a big wobbly needle.

  Mona gave him a look then, a come-on or a take-down, it was hard to tell, and said that was how she got up the duff in the first place.

  When Jimmy leans in to kiss Mona goodbye, she moves her mouth at the last moment to just miss his lips.

  The terrace kitchen is too small and Mona hasn’t given him that look for a long time.

  The Volvo is parked at an odd angle on the other side of the street. He crosses over and leans in the open window, grabbing keys still in the ignition. He sits in the hot car, flapping away a wasp attracted to a half-eaten banana mashed onto the passenger seat.

  He doesn’t remember driving home.

  The girl. Their mouths weren’t the right fit and when they kissed her front teeth banged against his, jarring like a punch.

  The girl has left her stamp on him. His thighs are sore. He’s been clubbing again.

  The phone rings and he picks it up to look. It’s Mona. FaceTime. He’s only just left.

  It’ll be about the baby’s car seat.

  The last thing he wants is for her to see his face right now.

  It’s an easy walk to Silver Top Taxis but he’s already made up his mind. He’s not driving anyone else around today.

  He glides the windows up, enjoying the aircon cruise.

  He turns left when he should turn right and lets his burning steering wheel guide him through the cramped streets of Newtown, floating down Parramatta Road, against the traffic now it’s getting past nine.

  The smoky coil of a freeway unfurls to apricot bricks then eucalyptus-oiled haze.

  IN BETWEEN DAYS

  Sydney, 2010

  It takes Mona a while to get out of bed. No birds. The planes have started up again, the drone tremors in the walls.

  No Jimmy.

  She uses hands to bulge sideways then tilts to get her feet on the floor. Each night she dreams of an ensuite she can visit with her eyes closed. Pushing back at the hard crack of awake.

  The baby in her stomach has started partying in the early morning with a game of hokey-pokey. Mona sings along until – she’s forgotten the words now. So many songs left on the sidelines, strays in her memory, unpluckable.

  She’s naked again. She does a slow striptease during the early hours. No elastic. No synthetics.

  She misses the birds.

  Early in the pregnancy she walked straight into the bathroom door. Like the peace dove hurtling into the bay window when she was a teenager, a blast of feathers erupting. Just like a cartoon.

  At the time she had cried as her mum buried it.

  But it was a bit funny looking back. Jimmy had laughed.

  Her dog, Beanie, is scrabbling at the side gate and the knocking is getting louder. Jimmy must have forgotten his key again.

  It’s lucky she’s pregnant. She carries calm in front of her like a shield.

  She finds her cotton dressing gown on a hook and holds her stomach with one hand as she stretches up to get it. She can only just wind the cord around her middle now, no bow or double knot.

  When she opens the door she knows.

  The two men in uniform who peer through the flyscreen have that look they always have on TV. They glance at her body, trying to make it out in the gloom, and breathe in further.

  In the end, they push the wooden door against her and climb through sideways like cats. They try to help her to her feet.

  But she sinks down onto her hands and knees to save them saying it.

  She’s comfortable where she is. She wants to stay down low on the warm wood. Her knees start to slice as the floor bites into them so she lies down on her side.

  An officer, the one closest, bends on one knee as if he is proposing. His voice is measured, intent on the words he has to get through to her, green-lit.

  She wants to tell him it’s a waste of time.

  He reaches out to touch her arm, a ghost of a gesture. He says the words anyway.

  Body. Found. Sorry. Loss.

  Loss.

  The word hovers below her. A soft word for a hard feeling. Frozen solid then slowly dissolving, washing away traces, an act of disappearance, even tender.

  Loss. Jimmy.

  But she’s stuck in between the rug and the wood, the hard and the soft.

  The men stand above her, waiting, as if it’s all they ever do.

  One holds a parcel, a stranger at a birthday party.

  A pair of yellow knitted booties sits on the coffee table. It was the first thing Kaz did when Mona told her, knitted them in the softest wool you could imagine.

  Mona lies on the floor and whispers, I’m going to fucking kill you.

  The baby gives her insides a hokey-pokey kick.

  When Kaz gets to her daughter’s house from the airport the next day, the spare key is missing but the terrace door is open.

  Mona’s not answering her phone but that’s nothing new.

  The house is dark in the daylight and light in the nighttime. Kaz can’t see the stars in St Peters. She’s never had a decent sleep here.

  Jimmy’s door is closed.

  It always was, to hide the chaos.

  A shadow moves at the end of the hall, comes at her with hand extended.

  A man in an electric-blue suit.

  It must be the funeral director. But surely Mona wouldn’t have arranged that already.

  She sticks out her hand.

  Leaning towers of paper spread across the kitchen benches and completely cover the floor.

  The man steps around like a panther.

  Are you Mona?

  The man double-checks the name on his form.

  Kaz looks around and shakes her head.

  Photo albums, a wash of images, printed out, all of the same face. Out of frame, her family torn in half, Jimmy’s large brown eyes obliterated with a red cross.

  He always looked different in photos, as if he was trapped behind glass.

  I’m here for the house inspection, the man says.

  The agent’s eyes focus. The mess. The cellophaned flowers. The breast pump still in plastic on the table.

  He shifts his weight and puts his clipboard back into a leather satchel.

  Perhaps I’ll come back another time.

  Kaz shows him out and checks all the rooms except Jimmy’s. It’s too hot for Mona to be out walking. Mona’s phone is on the bench for clues.

  Facebook messages.

  The friends-who-had-never-known-Jimmy. The friends-who- wanted-to-know-exactly-what-had-happened. The friends- who-were-so-so-sorry-and-didn’t-know-what-to-say.

  The plastic Christmas tree is still up in the lounge room, all its baubles removed.

  She has so much to say but no one to say it to.

  Jimmy had been such a nurturer of them both
, making cups of tea, whirling plates of spaghetti and wielding condiments that he collected for years in the fridge.

  He turned up to her fortieth birthday in one of Mona’s tartan dresses because he knew it would make her laugh.

  But it was a gradual process. Losing his sense of humour. His ability to be engaged in conversation.

  The last time she visited, he hadn’t sat down for a meal with them. He was hovering on the fringes, a spiky energy.

  As she tries to piece the photos back together, she realises this is a recycled grief. She’d already been feeling the loss of him.

  She empties the dishwasher and opens the washing machine to stale sheets.

  Barging through the screen door with the basket and pegs, the stink of days of dog shit greets her, wet with the heat, smeared and starting to bake in the hot-bricked grooves.

  A clothes line links baby suits stiff as kiln clay under a fig tree already sabotaged by birds.

  The aeroplanes are so low she can tickle their underbellies when she hangs out the washing.

  Beanie! Where are you?

  Kaz turns the corner, dodging shitty brown bullets, to a glimpse of her daughter.

  Bare feet curled up with soles to the sun, butterfly tattoo on an ankle taking off into the blue.

  In the kennel, Mona is asleep, arms around the dog’s apricot fur.

  The dog looks at Kaz but stays in the kennel and doesn’t budge, just wiggles her tail sideways beneath Mona in an arc of I’m-not-moving love.

  The alarm on Mona’s phone beeps every couple of hours for the diabetes test. Take that quick swab of blood. Her gut’s nervous as the numbers come up. Sugar too high. Married to those flashing digits.

  Her mum brings her cups of hot water with milk and they both pretend it’s tea. Mona misses the caffeine hit. She forces herself to pick at the mountain bread that tastes the way it looks. Just like all the other food she’s allowed to have, it reminds her of what she’s missing out on.

  Comfort.

  Kaz remembers that woman on the beach at Phillip Island. She’d fallen in the surf as the family lined up for a photo. She couldn’t get up, get a footing, in the wet sand. She was beached, knocked by each gentle wave, sinking deeper until she was lying on her side, just her head above the water, unable to roll back.