Almost a Mirror

by Kirsten Krauth

  So you could tell the difference?

  Jimmy nods.

  Once I had to do a project for school and I was doing the family tree and Mum said she used to be a Siamese twin and the doctors cut them apart. Sometimes when she talked fast she forgot to feed the dogs.

  What happened?

  Sometimes the dogs died.

  Kaz reaches out and holds his hand at the table and Jimmy pulls it away.

  Mum said that when she died she wanted her ashes to be sprinkled somewhere where there was water because she always wanted a water view. She always laughed when she said that. And when she laughed she always coughed. Like this.

  Jimmy gives a big emphysemic cough.

  How do you scatter the ashes, exactly? Jimmy asks.

  Kaz leans in to brush the long hair from his face.

  Well, the ashes get put in an urn, and you take the urn to a beautiful place and scatter the ashes around and say a special thing about your mum, if you want.

  IN YOUR EYES

  Castlemaine, 2010

  The hallway still smells the same. Stewed apples and clove cigarettes and a dustiness that makes Mona feel cold. The photos are gone. Just the ghosts of two frames, a slight fading of the dark red paint.

  Kaz bends down to help unzip Mona’s boots. Mona can’t even see her feet now.

  Kaz heads out to the bungalow, Beanie in front as if she owns the place.

  The grass and camellias have been ripped out, cottage neatness transformed into the boxed-in rambling of rusty brown natives and ground covers acclimatised to the late afternoon heat.

  Mona is so dry her tongue feels fat in her mouth.

  Kaz moves over to the back gate to smoke.

  I know I promised I’d quit before the baby comes. Can I touch your tummy?

  When you’ve finished your smoke. You know, those Indonesian cigarettes are worse than regular tobacco.

  They’re healthy! They’re herbal!

  The scent of cloves makes Mona feel queasy.

  Mona lets Kaz’s palm rest under her belly button. A quiet pressing of heat.

  Are you okay to go in? You can lean on me if you want.

  Kaz holds her steady as she opens the bungalow door.

  It’s still the bright purple she painted it. The red ceiling that only Jimmy could reach. The bookshelves are empty. It’s neater than it ever was when they lived in it. Storage boxes stacked in a corner and her double bed made up with a cream waffle blanket.

  Scott Carne looks lonely up there, blu-tacked.

  Kaz turns on the ceiling fan. It ruffles Scott’s floppy fringe.

  The fan still works pretty well, but you can sleep inside if it’s too hot, or if you want company. Are you sure you want to stay out here or is it too much?

  Mona lies down on the bed.

  I’ll probably have to sleep inside tonight so I can get to the loo, or I’ll need a potty. But I might have a nanna nap now.

  Kaz pokes her in the belly.

  I’ll be able to say that and really mean it soon.

  When Mona was a kid, Kaz would put two sets of PJs under her pillow: one for hot and one for cold.

  Now Mona lies sideways in a sarong, dancing with the bodylength pillow, soft, one leg splayed over and wrapped around. An XXL pole dancer.

  Kaz’s hospital-corner sheets are too tight and Mona’s too tired to prick her finger for the diabetes test. She can count carbs in her sleep.

  The pillow smothers her with the scent of tea-tree as she overlays a new map of Castlemaine onto her old one.

  The streets where her friends lived.

  The blockies in her first car looking for an escape route, Jimmy yelling out the window.

  Pinnies and Pacman at the Austral and the waiting, waiting for something to happen.

  The underage drinking and dancing at the club.

  Hunting for possums in the botanical gardens and Jimmy climbing trees to catch them.

  He never got close.

  She looks at the sky out the window. A storm coming.

  In summer Jimmy would drop in to the bungalow at night and watch the air of the fan touch her skin. He’d ride his bike from Campbells Creek at dusk. They’d sit up on pillows and reach out for the cool change.

  The lightning.

  The hot touch.

  Sudden rush.

  The first time, he stood outside with his cassette player and sang The Clash. Should I stay or should I go?

  His dark mouth. Eyes laughing and confident of the answer.

  The first time, it had hurt more than expected. But she wasn’t sure if it had hurt more than it should.

  The first time, he had been gentle. Even when his skin was rough.

  The first time, that was all that mattered.

  At Dodge’s first exhibition, she had roamed the images in the gallery, waiting for someone to point, to recognise her, to call out.

  Jimmy had been there that night, sitting in the shadows, smoking cigarette to cigarette, black clothes and craggy hair like a bird.

  They’d shared quiet corner kisses.

  In Dodge’s deserted wastelands.

  In abandoned buildings, in the heat, in gathering blackness, in the crisp starlight, in hunger.

  All of Dodge’s photos were Untitled. She wanted to be named.

  It was the week before her birthday party.

  The week before Jimmy cried and scratched his face so hard it bled. Nails raking hate into skin.

  He wanted it out of him, he said. The taste of shame.

  His cheeks wounded with scars of light.

  Her body learnt to orgasm before she caught up with the word.

  She read books, grabbed randomly from Kaz’s shelves, left behind at holiday houses – The Dice Man, Fear of Flying, Forever – that taught her new ways.

  An arrow pointing straight from her belly button shooting hot sparks to her toes. Light and heat.

  She’d crossed her legs and rocked in bed and kept on rocking until large pink marks, tender shapes, shadowed the insides of her thighs, and she’d taken her time watching them disappear to white.

  They looked like they hurt but they felt so good.

  And she rolled over and switched legs and started again.

  Kaz said she could always ask her anything anytime. Kaz talked about the clitoris and vagina and vulva and masturbation.

  Mona wasn’t sure whether that was what she was doing exactly but she didn’t know what other questions to ask.

  She read more books – boys and their penises and ejaculations and nocturnal emissions.

  But nothing she read quite matched this secret part of her.

  She wondered if she was the only girl in the world who’d discovered it.

  Mona sets her phone to Nature Sounds, scrolling through six hundred renditions of rain. Oregon Rainforest. Downpour on a Japanese Temple.

  She lights the bamboo candle. At first all she can smell is dust.

  In the reflection of the magiplug past her toes, the golden flame surrounds her head.

  She perches the washcloth on her cold belly button jutting out of the bathwater.

  She plays the game.

  If she was an artwork, she’d be a Byzantine Madonna holding her child, a mosaic halo of blue and gold.

  Her face glows.

  A fire inside. Pushing her out to look for new bodies to touch. To bury herself in grooves in the dark. Feet on pavements. Move move move.

  Grief. Lust. Shame. They all taste the same.

  She runs palms around her stomach in circles, feeling the ripples of her baby extend out through her skin. A constant game of hide-and-seek now.

  So physical, like a contact sport.

  She chucks the Pears soap out of the bath. A bolt of morning sickness. Always-sickness.

  The after-scent of Jimmy. He’d never really been convinced that he needed to buy another brand, even though being near him after he’d had a shower made her gag.

  The dog scratches at the door, claws planing the
old wood, and she yells at her.

  In the bungalow now she rocks and rubs until it’s sore. If she keeps going she might erase herself from the scene entirely. For it’s only in the moment she comes that Jimmy’s weight, imagined, conjured up, is lifted off her. It’s only a moment but it’s the moment she’s allowed to – her body even lets her – fall asleep.

  Kaz knocks on the bungalow door, then drags the trunk in. She marches back into the house, her strong body in singlet and shorts. An affront to Mona. All jellyfish wobble.

  The box is shaped like a coffin.

  Always the way. All thoughts align.

  The box is an excavation of mother pride. Mona’s reports and first drawings and shaky handwriting on red-drawn lines and contact sheets of geraniums and bits of Russian dolls that have lost their tops and bottoms.

  But they are not what she is looking for.

  Dodge’s images are out of their frames. Kaz has folded them up and crammed them in. The bodies are creased.

  They’d be worth thousands by now.

  Mona turns the light off so she can line up the two photos in the dark.

  First, the naked girl dreaming, legs wide open to the night above. A sweet cherry taste of her.

  Then the triptych of gathering loss. A layer of grunge swept under the majesty of the Ballroom. The chandeliers and opulence. The girl, defiant. The boy, a disappearing act.

  Wearing matching robes of pain. His and hers.

  Mona searches in the drawer of her bedside table. The drawer where everything that didn’t fit was always stuffed. Matches. Spare change. Rubber bands. Blu Tack.

  The drawer where you could never find what you needed in a hurry.

  But it’s still there.

  The camera. The box with the original instructions.

  Kaz is outside whistling to the chooks as it gets dark and Mona waits until she hears the screen door slam. She grabs the phone, scrolls through her playlists and finds the song.

  Mona can never look at Dodge’s photos without hearing it.

  She turns the fan on and stands with her back against the door.

  Mona first sets the match’s flame to her young naked body in the dark, an elegant makeover of oranges and blacks, Medusa curls in and outwards.

  She holds up Dodge’s other photo and strikes it down too.

  The ruined buildings, the dead desires, the marble bodies, the bloody filth. Jimmy’s muddy feet, burning now, falling through the floorboard cracks.

  It was playing at Mona’s birthday party, this song.

  But she could never play it when Jimmy was around.

  Janet Baker’s voice fills the space in the room and Mona turns it up as loud as it can go.

  Was dir noch Augen sind in diesen Tagen, / In künft’gen Nächten sind es dir nur Sterne.

  What are only eyes to you now, / In the coming night shall be your stars.

  She wishes that, just this once, she could reach out and touch Jimmy’s face.

  Mahler drifts out the window, evaporating into the breathless night, and leaves her alone.

  All that’s left is smoke.

  CAN YOUR PUSSY DO THE DOG?

  Castlemaine, 2010

  The Bridge is perched on a corner opposite the park, saloonstyle, waiting for horses to be tied up by the wagon wheel under the overhang.

  It’s a beacon on the street, the only light trailing down the road.

  Mona orders a Guinness and sits down at the bar, kicks off thongs. It’s dusky, chipped black floors. Lamps hang, bowlshaped, over the drinkers’ faces.

  A place you can sit alone.

  She has to push the bar stool out to make room for her belly. Daggy arches lead to the beer garden where Jimmy first got stoned.

  Her grandmother always said a Guinness was good for you during pregnancy.

  She is getting too close to care.

  A man sits down next to Mona and takes off his trilby. The kind of bald head that she likes. Boldly bald. Not hiding behind remnants.

  He looks familiar, but then again everyone does in Castlemaine.

  He buys a ticket to the gig and glances around.

  ‘A Formidable Marinade’. You know it? he asks.

  Once you’ve heard it, you never forget it.

  She swivels around so he can see her belly.

  Are you a local? he asks.

  He orders a pint of Mountain Goat.

  I grew up here and left and came back. How about you?

  I’ve been here about five years now. From Northcote.

  She laughs.

  You’re one of them. North Northcote.

  He looks sheepish and offers his hand to shake.

  Don’t say it too loud! I’m Beñat.

  She tries to pronounce his name. She’s not even close.

  He corrects her with a grin. It’s soft like La Niña but with a hard T at the end.

  How do you spell that?

  B-E-N-A-T. With a little symbol over the N.

  Spanish?

  Close. Just over the border. French. Basque, actually. My father was from there.

  Where do you live in town? Mona asks.

  He smiles.

  You’d never ask that in Melbourne.

  People just want to put you in your place.

  I’m in Ross Drive – you head up to Chewton, turn right after Forest Creek and go up the hill over the railway bridge.

  She tracks the map in her head and gives up and nods anyway.

  And you?

  I’m just around the corner. Gingell Street. Easy walking distance. Or not so easy at the moment.

  He blinks at her belly.

  When are you due?

  A couple of months and counting. I’m Mona.

  The backs of her legs stick to the vinyl, slurping as she stands up.

  She buys a ticket.

  Beñat carries their drinks around the corner of the bar to where the musician is getting plugged in on stage.

  The room is David Lynch dreamy. A small proscenium arch and lush velvet curtains. Abstract blue wallpaper fringes the wooden beams, drops her into the ocean.

  The stage is just wide enough for the performer. The shine of his pomade reflects the loops of fairy lights above, guitar glints like glass.

  He stands with one leg slightly bent as though bracing for a fall, white collar jutting out from red jacket. He sings Elvis.

  She notices Beñat’s hands as he puts the glasses on the table.

  Black boots, black jeans, black T-shirt. He can bring it off.

  Black humour, she hopes.

  The singer gives up on Elvis.

  Are you a musician? she asks.

  I don’t really play anymore but I make instruments. Flutes, oboes, guitars, ukuleles.

  Do you work from home? she asks.

  I teach in Melbourne and I have a studio out the back of my place.

  I thought you worked with your hands.

  He looks at her then. It’s just a glance.

  They sit quiet for a while, listening to the music.

  What about you? he asks.

  I teach as well. Art, mainly. Primary school. But not at the moment.

  As she says it, she suddenly realises how much she misses them. The kids. Their unruly hair and gifts in the morning. A daffodil. A handmade card saying she’s AWESOME.

  So what was the first band you ever liked? she asks.

  She touches him on the arm.

  No pressure, she says.

  He takes a sip of beer.

  I can go first. I remember watching Countdown and seeing ‘You’re the One That I Want’. I wanted to be Olivia Newton-John.

  He nods.

  I wanted to be David Bowie. He got me into music and then I discovered punk. I was only thirteen but my brother took me along to the clubs. I learned guitar. I played in bands back then.

  She imagines him on stage. Man in black.

  When I was thirteen, I only had eyes for Scott Carne from Kids in the Kitchen. With a bit of Duran Dura
n. I was very loyal.

  He laughs.

  I can picture you as a New Romantic, he says.

  She points to her striped T-shirt. It hangs off a shoulder.

  I can’t seem to escape the eighties.

  She looks at him this time and he seems to shift gear, melting into the music.

  The musician plays covers as the crowd calls them out. He strums wicked games and sails ships around them. He tries The Cramps.

  By the time he goes full tilt and reaches the chorus of ‘Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?’ the newly drunk audience is barking and she’s finished the Guinness.

  Beñat gets his phone out to use as a torch. They shamble past the flats in Gingell Street, tripping alongside the creek and the train station.

  He holds her arm as if he’s afraid she’ll go over the edge and fall in.

  Jingell, Gyngell, Jingle. I’m never sure how to say it, he says.

  Everyone argues about it. But I’m sticking with Jingle.

  She stumbles over a tree root.

  We could have just taken my car, he says.

  It’s only five minutes!

  When they get to Kaz’s place they edge down the side of the house, trying to avoid the sensor light that comes on as if she is thirteen again.

  She opens the bungalow door and looks around as if it’s somewhere new.

  The only place to sit is on the double bed.

  She sweeps yesterday’s clothes with her foot to cover the potty and turns the pillows over.

  I’d offer you a wine but I don’t have any bevvies out here. I do have a kettle. Herbal tea?

  He looks up at the poster of Scott Carne on the ceiling and smiles.

  She is close but not close enough. He takes the mug out of her hand and sits her on the bed.

  She opens her eyes to watch him as they kiss.

  He puts his hands in her hair. The only part of her that feels wild tonight.

  When she closes her eyes again, she lies down, pulls him to her hip.

  His T-shirt off.

  He tugs her shirt up so her belly is between them, shiny like a beach ball, his face almost reflected. He traces the fuzzy line down from her belly button until his fingers make her jump.

  He bites her ear. Do you want me to eat you?

  She wants to grab him and tell him and rush him.