Pulse Points

by Jennifer Down

  The hot water had almost run out by the time Ramesh got to shower. When he made it to the bedroom, Henry was standing by the window wearing his pyjama bottoms, two fingers pressed to the pulse point on his neck. His bare chest and belly stirred something in Ramesh. He touched Henry’s neck with his own fingers, sought the soft hollow by his windpipe. He felt the steady throb. He kissed him there.

  The bed was already warm when he turned back the sheets. Henry had switched on the electric blanket for him.

  ‘I feel like we should tell someone what happened,’ Ramesh said.

  ‘Who could we tell now?’ Henry reached over and snapped off the bedside lamp. ‘It’s two-thirty.’

  Ramesh was used to the sounds of the suburbs. He never noticed barking dogs or level crossings. On the train to work every morning he turned up the volume of his audiobook so it was louder than other passengers’ mobile phone conversations. But the country roared. He could hear the air move in the trees. He had grown up in Croydon, moved to Glasgow at seventeen, back to London at twenty-three, then Sydney at thirty-six. As a child he’d stood outside his parents’ bedroom listening to his father’s whistling snore. He liked living in places where he could hear others alive. He reached for his phone where it sat charging. For an instant he saw his hands illuminated in the bluish light of its screen. He set his rain sound app to the setting called ‘Harbour Storm’.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Henry croaked. His face was pressed to the pillow. ‘You don’t need that tonight.’

  Ramesh opened his mouth to argue, then he heard the rain outside, like gunfire on the corrugated iron roof.

  In the morning they called Niamh to tell her what had happened. I saw it on the news, she said. Was that you two found him? She began to cry.

  In the afternoon they drove to the police station to speak with the homicide detectives. They were interviewed separately, Henry first. Ramesh waited outside on a sculpted plastic chair. He pulled out his phone and scrolled through Facebook, but it felt sacrilegious. He listened to the coppers’ laconic conversation. He’d often told Henry, I don’t trust the police, and meant it. But here, now, these officers reminded him of kids horsing around backstage at a school play.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said at last. ‘Is it all right if I go and get the paper?’

  They looked up. A young uniformed woman gestured at the door with an open palm. ‘You can go and get a coffee if you want, mate,’ she said. ‘You’re not in trouble.’

  Afterwards they hurried home so Henry could meet another estate agent. They’d barely stepped in the door when Niamh’s old Toyota pulled up outside. She hugged them both tightly. Ramesh felt the bones of her shoulders through her parka.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

  Henry rubbed his face. ‘Pretty awful, actually. I can’t get it out of my head.’

  ‘I bet you can’t.’ She stood helplessly, looking from one face to the other. ‘You should both see someone. When you get back to Sydney. That’s a traumatic thing to happen to a person.’

  They moved into the kitchen. The heavy lace curtains had been stripped from the windows to be laundered; the room seemed white and naked. Niamh gave a little oh of sorrow when she saw the empty shelves, the fridge bare of pictures and magnets.

  ‘What time’s this wanker supposed to be here?’ Henry asked.

  ‘The agent? Three-thirty.’

  ‘Hey, while you’re here now, do you wanna take a look at the crockery and see what you want?’ Henry said. ‘I’ll take the rest to the op shop tomorrow.’

  ‘I might leave you to it,’ said Ramesh. ‘Go and visit Gerry.’ They both glanced at him in surprise. Their faces were unmistakeably sibling. He felt like crying.

  The old man had watery blue eyes. He looked betrayed. Ramesh made two cups of instant coffee in the communal kitchen, half filling Gerry’s with tap water so he wouldn’t forget it was hot and burn himself. He could get away with certain things, since the old man wasn’t his father. They sat in Gerry’s room, at the card table and canvas chairs they’d brought from home.

  ‘You understand,’ he said to Ramesh. ‘You can’t take a man’s house away from him.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Gerry,’ said Ramesh.

  ‘If you’re sorry, get me out of here. I’ll give over my licence. I’ll be good, I promise.’

  ‘It’s not about being good,’ Ramesh said gently.

  ‘Bugger you, then,’ said Gerry. ‘Bugger the lot of you.’

  He turned his face to the wall. Ramesh drew a breath deep into his belly.

  ‘The other night,’ he began, ‘Henry and I were driving home and we found a man on the side of the road. He was dying, but we didn’t know that yet. I didn’t even see him till we stopped. Henry just hit the brakes. I thought it might have been a roo.’

  Gerry was facing him again, sitting quite still, listening intently.

  ‘We thought he’d been hit by a car, perhaps, or that he was a drunk. I called the ambulance and they told us to start CPR. And we turned him over—he was on his stomach, face down—and half his face was missing. And this woman was on the phone asking Henry to start mouth-to-mouth, and—he barely had a mouth. Somebody had shot him in the head.’

  Gerry’s face was a rictus of horror.

  ‘His brain was outside his skull,’ Ramesh said. ‘There was so little for Henry to breathe into.’

  A sturdy nurse pushed through the door. An acrid puff of shit and vegetables followed her.

  ‘Hello,’ she said when she saw Ramesh, and beamed. ‘You’re Gerry’s son-in-law? He’s settling in really well. Aren’t you, Gerry? I just came in to see if you were ready for dinner.’

  ‘Is it that time?’ said Gerry.

  ‘Roast lamb,’ said the nurse.

  ‘I’d better leave you to it, then,’ said Ramesh. He walked Gerry to the dining room and sat him at a table with the other patients. He touched Gerry’s shoulder and said goodbye. Gerry’s eyes flicked over him, to a new anchorless point in space. Ramesh thought of ghosts.

  He stopped at the IGA on the way home to buy soup fixings. He hovered in front of the limes. It was the middle of winter and they were expensive. He bought four. They were so small he could hold them in one hand.

  It was late afternoon when he got back. The car stirred the dust of the long curving driveway, flattened the dried agapanthus heads that had dropped to the ground. He sniffed his hands. They smelled of skin and oil, his own smell, not blood. He went to the door with a plastic bag in each hand, and Henry opened it before he had a chance to knock. He took Ramesh in his arms, held him fiercely. He kissed his brow.

  ‘I was only visiting Gerry,’ Ramesh said. The plastic bags were cutting into his fingers. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Henry said. He raised his shoulders. ‘I worked myself up.’ Ramesh waited for him to ask after his father, but he said nothing.

  They sat side by side at the kitchen table to peel and cut the vegetables.

  ‘Have you ever had to call an ambulance before?’ Ramesh asked.

  Henry didn’t look up from the leek he was slicing. ‘Once, at uni,’ he said, ‘a friend OD’d at a party and started seizing.’ The knife made a rhythmic sound. ‘Not really a friend. Just someone I knew. I ended up riding with him to hospital. He was fine. I don’t think I saw him again after that.’

  Henry carried the chopping board to the stove. The leek hissed when he tipped it into the pot. The groceries were lined up neatly below the window. He picked up one of the small hard limes, held it in his palm as though weighing it.

  ‘What’d you get these for?’ he asked.

  Ramesh was suddenly shy.

  ‘Mum used to say they were antiseptic,’ he said. ‘Spiritually, as well as—’

  Henry nodded. He put the lime back with the others.

  At dusk they walked the perimeter of the property. The grass was silvery in the half-light. They went slowly, without marking rotted fence posts or collapsed sections of wire. They were
in their matching boots, bought cheaply at Aussie Disposals a few years back, which Ramesh called wellies and Henry called gummies. The damp earth softened beneath them.

  Henry walked looking at his feet. ‘Dad used to tell this story about how after the fires, people whose houses had survived went and laid in the fields to sleep.’

  ‘The trauma was too much for them to return to their homes?’

  ‘He said it was the guilt,’ Henry said, ‘about still having a bed and a carport when their neighbours’ lives had been burned to the ground.’

  They’d reached the far end of the paddock, where the ground sloped away.

  ‘It couldn’t be totally true,’ Ramesh said at last. ‘People couldn’t have literally slept in the fields, on the ashes. It’d be too hot.’

  ‘Perhaps he meant that they just couldn’t return to their beds.’

  Ramesh thought of other stories he’d heard—a woman who’d jumped into a dam, thinking water would be safe, and who boiled. Wives walking away from their husbands in the sudden flare of clarity stirred by disaster. The drag of breath through dampened tea towels. The horses screaming. He tried to understand it.

  ‘Henry,’ he said. ‘I want to go home.’

  AOKIGAHARA

  I phoned my father when I arrived.

  He said, Your mum’s just round at Aunty El’s, in such a way that I knew she wasn’t; that she’d left the room with her hand to her mouth when he’d first said, Hullo, love, and I felt so sorry for us all.

  The hotel room was cool and masculine. I drew back the curtains and looked out. The cityscape glittered from two big windows, like a part of some vast computer. My fingertips tingled if I stood too close to the glass. I wanted to sleep. I got between the starchy sheets. I couldn’t hear the city below, but all night I kept waking up and going over to the wide glass panes. I don’t know what I expected.

  In the morning the view was different and I could see it all as more than a billion lit squares. There was a sprawling park down below. Far off, the symmetrical peak of Mt Fuji. I sat in front of the window, naked, with the glossy map they’d given me in the lobby. I tried to work out where I was.

  I met an American woman in the elevator. She was here for work, she said; she visited twice a year. Her husband had long since stopped coming with her.

  ‘He thinks it’s exhausting. The sort of place you visit once or twice in your life. He’s from Montana.’ She gave an apologetic smile. She took out a palm-sized mirror and inspected her mouth. ‘Are you here on business?’

  ‘I’m visiting my brother,’ I said without thinking. A small mercy: her mobile phone rang, and we smiled at each other as the elevator doors opened into the lobby. I walked away with blood buzzing in my arms. I thought I’d better get my story straight.

  In the house I shared with him and Sigrid we’d lain on the living room carpet in an oxy dream. I was too fucked to lift my arms. Tom and Sigrid kissed in a slow, decadent way, faces turned towards each other, but not for long. I dozed there on the floor in a thick shaft of sunlight, my face pressed to the carpet. When a knock came at the door, the three of us were paralysed: Tom gave an indulgent laugh, but nobody moved.

  It was all summertime and glory that year: pikelets, braided hair and blood oranges; television, speed, flower crowns, silver dreams, tricks of the light. Long walks home from the city after a night that ended in tears and new jokes and pissing on someone’s front lawn, me and Sig giggling with our skirts up around our hips. Power-pedalling up the big hill at night, foreheads spangled with sweat.

  We had a poster of the Milky Way, the galaxy of our solar system, tacked up on the wall opposite the toilet, and another poster of constellations beneath it. I learned the names of stars and the pictures they made.

  I had no friends. I had only them: Tommy and Sigrid. I was the spectator, the sister; the joyful witness to their Great Passion.

  Eri called to say she was running late. I drank a beer and read my book in the greyish light. When she arrived she said Hisashiburi and gave me a quick, tight hug. Her hair was cut to her ears. I liked how small and tough she looked.

  ‘I was late at work,’ she said. ‘Osoku-natte sumimasen.’ She inclined her head and shrugged out of her coat.

  I explained what I wanted. Eri might have known. She looked at me levelly while I spoke.

  ‘I can’t go with you,’ she said. I was the one who looked away. ‘But my friend Yui—her father will take you. He’s a doctor, but he volunteers there sometimes. You can take a bus to Kawaguchiko station.’ Eri took up a pen. She said she’d organise it for me. She wrote the name of her friend and a phone number on a square of paper, and passed it to me with both hands. I never knew when to be humble, when to be reverent. I remembered the set phrases from high school, but not the feel of them in my mouth.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said again and again. ‘Osewa ni narimasu. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu.’ Thank you for caring for me. Sorry to be a burden. It’s what you say. We did it all back-to-front: first there was hardness; afterwards, decorum. We stayed there until after midnight. We talked about our jobs, about our families. Eri lied and said my Japanese was still very good. She was engaged to a schoolteacher. She hoped I’d come back for the wedding. I lied and said I would. She reached into her handbag and pulled out a blue envelope. Tucked inside was a photo—she, Tom and I down at Phillip Island, smiling grimly into the wind. Eri wore the pained expression of the exchange student; Tommy grinned from under a ridiculous knitted beanie. He looked healthy, indefatigable, victorious. I was blinking.

  Eri leaned by my shoulder, so close that I felt her hair against mine. She looked down at our pale adolescent faces. ‘I thought I took more pictures that day, but I could only find this,’ she said.

  I had the spins at Koenji station. I sobered up on the train back to the hotel. In my room I called Sigrid; lovely Sig who’d stayed with him all that time, who’d weathered his shit when the rest of us could no longer.

  ‘It’s all sorted. I’m going the day after tomorrow,’ I said. I realised I was going to sob.

  ‘Come home. You don’t need to do this for anyone else. You’re only doing it for you,’ Sigrid said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What’s it like there? Is it cold?’

  ‘You know Buddhists get a new name when they die?’ I told her. ‘To move away from one world and into the next—the afterlife, or whatever, a dead person gets a new name. So they don’t look back.’

  ‘Like Lot’s wife.’

  I wanted to stick my head into the night, to run around a cricket oval till I was ragged in the lungs. I was aching with a mad, violent energy, but all I could do was curl like a child in the cool bed. When we were kids walking home from school, Mum wouldn’t let me cut across the oval without Tom. It’s not good for a little girl to walk there by herself, she said. I did it anyway, but with a thrumming heart and quick legs, thinking of strange men and bodies in paddocks. It was a much shorter way of getting home. Whenever I banged through the screen door out of breath, schoolbag thumping against the small of my back, Tommy laughed. He’d say, ‘What are you scared of, Cammy? Worst thing you’re gunna see is Jade Pitrowski getting fingered in the tunnel.’ He never told Mum. Mostly we walked together.

  Dad and I found him once living in a shack up near Marysville. He’d been gone from home a few days. Detective games and phone calls to his friends led us nowhere: we had to wait for Tommy to reach us. He did, at last, and we went to retrieve him. We left Mum standing in the driveway at dusk, telling us to drive safe. I was still in my school uniform. Everyone was frightened of what we’d find this time; what fool’s gold lay at the end of the treasure-hunt instructions he’d had Dad scribble down over the phone. In the end, it was a monstrous Tommy, huddled like a dog in his windbreaker and filthy jeans in some abandoned farmhouse. We couldn’t go home, he said; we couldn’t leave yet. And so we stayed with him in that wormy wood shack. It was not far from the town. Dad drove in on
the second morning and bought food and polar-fleece blankets and we tried to make an adventure of it. I was impatient. When it got dark I lit all the candles and sat at the wooden table with my textbooks, highlighting over the words someone else had coloured before me. I learned nothing, remembered nothing. I only did it to say, Look, you selfish shit, it’s not always about you. See what you’re doing. I copied notes into my exercise books with their ruled margins, and did every revision question surrounded by my lumps of molten wax. I remembered nothing.

  Dad and Tom went for walks that lasted for hours. I wasn’t not invited, but nor was I quite welcome. Once I looked out the window and saw them standing twenty yards apart, knee-deep in grass. Tommy was bellowing something and they were too far away for me to hear at all, but I could see the strain in his neck, his Adam’s apple tight and tired, and I imagined him hoarse-voiced. He f lung out an arm in a posture of desperation. Dad waited for him to finish.

  We stayed there for three days. On the fourth day we drove home, all of us grimy and sour-breathed in our greasy wool jumpers and boots. Me the learner driver up front of the station wagon, easing the car around hairpin bends. Tommy in the back with his headphones, snarling at me to fucken step on it, will ya. Dad beside me mouthing to his Buffalo Springfield tape and looking over the sharp, ferny ledges when I wished he’d keep his eyes on the road, or tell me I was taking the corners too fast, because I was afraid. And the asphalt unfurling impossibly before us, canopied by the thickest forest I’d ever seen.