Almost a Mirror

by Kirsten Krauth

  She rips out things. Lines that she likes.

  After her birthday party, after he cries and she holds him, Jimmy opens up his brown leather doctor’s bag, shakes it upside down. He tips them onto the bed.

  They flutter like pantry moths, out of reach.

  She scoops the pictures in her hands. The ones she loves. Stolen.

  They put them up together in the little alcove, tacking Leonardo with Le Bon, Caravaggio with Carne, a row of Edward Hopper.

  She laughs, thinking of Dodge’s books on the shelves now, full of secret nibbled-out holes.

  ZOO MUSIC GIRL

  Melbourne, 1982

  In the beginning, there is darkness.

  The camera is shaking in his hands until he puts it on the tripod. It is much heavier than he remembered. The most important thing is to keep it all steady.

  It’s the best seat in the house, his boss has told him.

  Benny dangles on a platform just metres from the roof. He likes looking down on the Ballroom as if he’s swinging on the chandelier. People forget he’s up here.

  The Birthday Party start off aimless. They’re wasted men.

  Nick wanders about on stage like a deranged kid at a debutante ball. Tracy drifts. Tracy’s hat shelters his face, leather pants reflecting the lights, as he sweats.

  But as Nick starts to bump into him, Tracy wields his bass like a machine gun, starting to fire.

  First, you need to do a white balance.

  The repetitive bass line drowns the band, ritualistic, the one chord that builds a mood of menace, working as a mantra for the crowd, exorcising something from their souls.

  It’s Rowland who appears to do the work, all interior, wearing horizontal stripes, cigarette dangling at the corner of his mouth. The way he plays is frantic. Benny finds the intensity frightening. But as Rowland leans inwards, his guitar takes on the jarring whine of feedback. A broken bottle to the ears.

  Slow and steady. No jerky movements.

  Benny gets caught up in Rowland’s loop of sound and wants to know how he does it. The guitar at a certain angle as he sculpts noise, a violation that enters the body, that’s not meant to happen, channelling an animal that comes in and out of his control.

  Nick stumbles around with his large lolling head. The mic is jammed up to his mouth. A toddler clutching a bottle of milk in its fists, fearful of another kid grabbing it.

  Adjust the tripod and keep a wide angle.

  Nick pulses the beat with one clenched hand.

  Benny can see Guy to the side of stage. Playing roadie. Waiting for the fall.

  Nick disappears for a while. He comes back with a canvas, carrying it like a warrior shield. He tries to scale the PA stack but keeps falling down.

  He stutters. On. On. On his knees.

  Benny watches him, trying to anticipate his movements and keep him in frame. Nick moves so quickly but Benny’s watched him enough.

  It’s Jenny’s, an original oil painting neat across the canvas. Nick plays it like a wobble board before flinging it into the audience.

  And as it sails through the air, Benny captures its arc before it lands and is belted about by the crowd.

  I’ve seen everyone play here.

  The girls at the front watch the band like they’re in line for a beheading, waiting for Nick to be monstrous, to hurt them. The lights roam their faces, macabre in the twilight. Roll up for the freak show.

  He can see the platinum glint of Connie’s hair. She’s focused on Tracy and she’ll be flexing her fingers, playing along.

  He wants to wave.

  The girls stand together in the centre, hoping to be chosen. Glittering in the mirrors where Nick can see them reflected along with his own face.

  Nick pretends not to see them.

  He’s locked in battle with his songs, the band, and the audience too. Only occasionally does he surrender and let his body give in.

  Nick flings his hands out behind him and chops off Rowland’s cigarette, knocking it from his mouth. The ember burns into Nick’s hand and he keeps going before he screams.

  Nick and Rowland look like colour has never entered their world, flickering through black-and-white film.

  Don’t forget to keep checking the cables.

  Benny’s eyes move from one to the other, trying to decide who he’d rather be.

  The audience doesn’t sing but they know every pulse of it. They feel its physical effect, the landscape it travels through.

  But what they are really waiting for is to see Nick go manic. Benny waits for it too. That transition into some unknown space where things move from edgy to dangerous.

  Through it all, Mick plays in the shadows.

  Nick leans out into the audience with his long arms and grabs the graceful pale hand of a girl.

  He pulls her up on stage.

  She’s in a short velvet dress and is not sure what to do now she’s up there.

  She starts to sway, turned to Nick.

  Eyes only for Nick.

  He drapes himself around her, a praying mantis about to devour its prey. An ugly insect.

  The video is streamed live to the screen downstairs in the foyer.

  Nick grabs the lead and swings the mic like a lasso over Tracy’s head.

  It clunks to the ground sending a shock through the amps and Guy runs to get it, bent like a servant. Guy puts it back up on the mic stand.

  Nick grabs it and teases. Drops it again. A thump.

  Listen through the headphones and try to keep the audio levels consistent.

  It’s dropped again.

  Guy just leaves it.

  Tracy’s drunk and is starting to sway.

  Guy props him up with one hand, waiting for him to go facedown. Benny zooms in on Connie and hopes it happens. She’ll want to jump in, take over.

  The girl puts her arms around Nick and dances in front of him, whipping his body with her dark hair as he winds the lead around her neck.

  She dances near him, sullen as he takes her by the arm and tries to drag her back into the audience.

  But she doesn’t want to go back.

  Nick turns away from her, no longer interested, a discarded toy dropped from his tarantula hands.

  Nick lies on the front of the stage, face level with the crowd.

  He plays to the people, the waves of his lyrics rolling out.

  His body shakes like he’s having electric shock therapy.

  Make sure you spool the tape to the very end and back again before ejecting.

  He dangles the mic and rolls off stage, falling into the dark river of hands, disappearing below the crowd.

  He surfaces and tries to swim from the stage. As he strokes, the girl on stage starts to move away too, the mic lead a lazy loop.

  Benny waves from the platform, trying to get Guy’s attention.

  As Nick is surfed by the crowd, the lead gets tighter.

  Benny makes a cutting gesture to Mick, to stop the show, but he doesn’t look up.

  The girl’s body starts to float away.

  Mick and Rowland, on either side of the stage, stand there looking at each other while staccato drums continue the attack.

  And as the girl goes under, the crowd can now see.

  They rise up and start pushing Nick back to shore as he finishes the song, the girl floating with him.

  As she reaches the stage, Guy runs on and tries to loosen the lifeline, pulling the lead.

  An angry groove cuts into her neck.

  Nick bends to pick her up and lifts the noose above the girl’s head.

  He turns to the audience, palms outstretched. He holds the girl out to them, dangling in his arms.

  A lifeless girl, pale skin, long dark hair.

  A sacred offering.

  BIZARRE LOVE TRIANGLE

  Castlemaine & Melbourne, 1987

  The night before, Mona asks Jimmy to sit up and she lies in his arms. Rock-a-bye baby. She tries to get to sleep.

  She asks him to tell her a
story and he takes her to a beach. A slash of blue with tepid water, warm as a bath. North of Cairns, they wake up in a campervan, open the back doors to a palmfringed lagoon.

  He always takes her there.

  As Mona falls, she wakes up with a sound.

  Not a scream, more a loud grunt from her body, pushing air out, a form of protest.

  Sound and vision, feeling, take longer to reach her, as if Jimmy has stuck her down on the bungalow floor and rolled her in bubble wrap. Prodding and popping her every now and then to see if she’s still there.

  Her mouth. She can feel it. A sharp pain that drills into a number of teeth, gums dark pink and grooved like a bite of Flake.

  Her moon-coloured skin bleeds into the walls, adding to the purple hue, almost bruised now.

  Jimmy shifts so he’s lying down, pulls Mona with him.

  She thinks about which train to catch. They’ll need to get one early. It’ll be dark.

  I keep waking myself up, she says.

  Your body’s jerking. I’ve never heard you make that sound before. Are you sure you don’t want to tell your mum?

  I can’t say the words.

  I could come with you. Start you off …

  My body is judging me. That’s why I keep making that noise.

  You can’t think of it that way.

  But it’s something that’s ours, you know?

  Jimmy gets up on his knees to look out the window, his blue profile hidden behind ruffled fringe.

  Can you hear that? He cocks his head.

  The dark rumble starts. The late-night freight train thrusts past and starts the dogs barking.

  It always used to wake me up but I don’t hear it anymore.

  Jimmy rolls over to set the alarm and turns the blinking red numbers to the wall. They keep Mona awake when they stare. The moon projects a cold light onto her shape in the bed.

  I’m afraid to sleep. I keep falling. I don’t want to wake up. I don’t want to think, Mona says.

  Things are always harder in the night.

  You always say that.

  My mum always said that.

  Ask me in the morning.

  They lie side by side and he dangles one arm across her chest as if he’s a handbag hanging off her hip.

  She reaches over and holds his penis lightly in her hand as she closes her eyes. It doesn’t respond, comforted under the electric blanket, and for once she’s glad.

  The street is somewhere between suburban and industrial. Albert Park. Mona’s never been here before.

  Buildings a couple of storeys high line the road, reflecting the light, leaning over and harassing her. She almost can’t see Jimmy with so much glass and cement.

  The brick cottage has no sign out the front and sits off the road. It could be a home, for a family.

  Are you sure you don’t want me there? It doesn’t feel right just letting you go in.

  Mona shakes her head and Jimmy heads the way they’ve come, turning back every few steps. He’s wearing a suit and shiny brogues as if he’s going to a funeral.

  As she walks up the path, an elderly man in a white hat and shoes approaches her with a smile as he hands her a laminated A4 page.

  A series of small photographs.

  Creatures of pink and cream jelly. Bits of frog.

  A sharpened pencil pointing to a tiny hand, sprouting like a soft lotus flower in the dark.

  A dismembered foot riding on the bloodied face of a president on an American coin.

  Little red slivers of bloody wobble, the last bits left in the bottom of a pack of lolly snakes.

  His look turns from friendly. Leaning against a tree is his placard:

  HALF THE PATIENTS ENTERING AN ABORTION CLINIC NEVER COME OUT ALIVE!

  She turns back to call Jimmy but he’s gone around the corner now.

  Have you seen The Silent Scream?

  She drops the page onto the ground and runs to the front door, searching for a way in. She punches the buzzer, staccato.

  Do you have an appointment?

  She whispers her name so the man in the hat can’t hear.

  Inside, she’s glad there aren’t any windows and she can’t see the man at all. In the waiting room she’s adrift in a sea of couples, men and women, girls and mothers.

  No one talks.

  The walls are fake sunlight yellow and the posters are bathed in warmth. Golden Summer. Water Lilies. Sunflowers.

  As she waits she swirls into the straw petals of Van Gogh and wonders why he cut off his ear.

  Was the world too intense?

  She plays the game and wishes Jimmy was there.

  If she was an artwork, she’d be The Siesta, lying with her lover, eyes closed, hats pulled down, shoes and scythes next to them on the hay, adrift and oblivious.

  She sits and waits for an hour in this hot small room. She’s chopping out a part of herself too.

  Robyn, her art teacher, said Van Gogh was insane. Maybe that’s all it was.

  Are you alone? We usually encourage you to bring a support person.

  The counsellor has a badge with her name on it and looks at Mona as if she really cares.

  It makes Mona almost give in to a feeling, but without the solidity of Jimmy it’s so much easier to lie.

  I have to ask you, have you thought through the consequences, considered all the options?

  I don’t really see any other option.

  What about the father?

  We’re not together anymore, she says.

  I notice you live in Castlemaine. Is someone picking you up afterwards?

  A friend.

  Short and succinct, so she doesn’t get tripped up in excess words. She gives the answers and knows the counsellor is ticking them off her list.

  Bodies in uniforms come and go. They poke her and ask questions. They shuffle her about.

  The rooms are all the same, clean, as if no one’s ever been there before her.

  She imagines her blood dripping onto the tiles and where it will go.

  A man in green hands her a gown. It’s the same colour as the walls. She ties it up to cover her breasts but it flaps open at the bottom, exposing her.

  She holds the little cup and her wee sounds like a downpour on the bungalow roof. The alien man comes in to get her because she’s taking so long. He takes the cup.

  Your gown is on the wrong way around. The tie goes at the back.

  She takes it off as he waits outside and ties a knot behind her back with hands that slip on the fabric. She sees her mum in an apron shifting sausages around.

  She just wants to lie down on the bench and sleep.

  Are you okay in there?

  At the operating table, they are all standing with their gowns and masks on. There are no introductions and she counts backwards from ten when they tell her, not believing it will work.

  The last thing she sees is the alien man smiling beneath his mask.

  It’s not the place for smiles.

  Gone.

  The legs are spread and the feet lifted into stirrups and the speculum is placed into the vagina and the cervix is examined, and the tenaculum is fastened onto the cervix, and a sound checks the depth of the uterus, and a set of ever-widening instruments is inserted to dilate the cervix, and a suction apparatus is opened from its sterile container, and inserted through the dilated cervix into the uterus, and the sack is punctured, draining the amniotic fluid, and mercury is applied to the instrument, and a long suction tube is attached to the abortion machine, and the suction tip acts as a vacuum for the foetus body, and the polyp forceps are introduced to the cervix, and the contents of the foetus head and bones are extracted, and the products of conception are placed in a bowl and covered with yellow plastic, and wheeled out of theatre, before the patient becomes conscious.

  Mona wakes up on her side in the foetal position. A child dragged from sleep at a grown-ups’ party, thrown over a shoulder, midnight-drugged on the car trip home.

  The room is full of
girls on camp stretchers, soft striped blurry nighties, in various states of standing up and lying down.

  Doctor Susan warned her that the place was a bit like a cattle factory, churning people through with not much care.

  But she’s surprised by all the girls here.

  All alone, a sombre slumber party.

  Her nightie is up around her hips. She can’t remember someone putting it on. Getting her ready for bed without her knowing.

  A woman prods her with a gentle hand.

  You need to wake up now.

  The other girls seem to be finding it easier. They are all moving about, shadows of their former selves.

  She lays her head back down, closes her eyes, seduced by the fog.

  The pain is there.

  The woman comes back and looks at her again, moving closer.

  It’s taking you a while to come out of the anaesthetic. It’s important that you wake.

  The woman holds her elbow as if she’s an old lady and sits her up.

  Mona notices an enormous pad between her legs. She can’t go out with that on. But she can feel the blood writhing like a river.

  She moves and looks at spots and clots on the sheet, a final flick of the paintbrush, blood so dark it’s almost black.

  You’ll be bleeding heavily for a few days. Did you bring pads?

  Mona tries to remember and fossicks in her bag for Carefree, the ones she wears at night.

  They won’t work. You need this kind. Here, take a couple to get you home.

  The words maternity pads glare off the packet, taunting her. Not the right words or ones that fit now.

  A reminder, of what she’s failed at.

  The woman hands her a form as if she doesn’t expect Mona to read it, and she doesn’t. It’s hard to tell whether she’s on the side of asleep or awake. She’s never known her brain to be slow like this.

  As she holds the pen, she searches for the collection of capitals, vowels and consonants, waiting for them to pull together in the right order.

  The signature on the form, as it comes from the pen, is a fragile, deformed thing.

  She doesn’t recognise it at all.

  ALONE WITH YOU

  Melbourne, 1982

  Connie’s leaving so Benny follows her out.

  They both lug their guitars down the stairs and start to walk. It’s too risky at Guy’s. Things always go missing in the night.