We were lucky to have that time. Toast soldiers, talkback radio in the morning, Granddad with his unsolved mysteries about lead masks and Harold Holt and the nine ski hikers who died inexplicably on a mountain in Russia. Nan cleaned the dirt from my bellybutton and behind my ears with tea tree oil and said Oh, you grot! but always in a nice way. Nan and Granddad tried to make everything as normal as they could, like they were our parents, just old. It didn’t end because I killed Harry the guinea pig, but that happened right before Mum reappeared and took us home to Melbourne, so for a long time, in my head at least, those two things were linked. Cause and effect. I was maybe fourteen when I told a psychologist about it—I’d been seeing her because of something that had happened in resi, but for some reason Harry popped into my head. I was so ashamed to tell her, I wept. She was nice about it, though. She said something about how when I was that age, I’d never had much control over anything that happened to me, and how I probably wanted to know what it was like to be the one in charge.
I don’t know why I did it. I only remember Sam’s face, the revulsion on it, and how I could fool Granddad, but not him, that it was an accident.
He was back in the hospital four days later, worse than before. He had two transfusions in a week. I called Theo, who came straightaway. He sat on the end of the bed.
‘When I didn’t hear from you after the other night,’ he said, ‘I got worried you’d gone off to die by yourself like a dog.’
‘You’ve got no idea what it’s like,’ Sam said.
‘I think I’ve got a bit of an idea. Fuck you.’
‘You don’t. What if I want to be by myself? No one’s asking me what I want. They just keep giving me clean blood.’ He was short of breath. Grey lips.
They had a fight right there in the room. I kept trying to leave but they both wanted me to witness it. We all cried. Theo left.
Sam asked what the weather was like outside. I told him it was pissing down.
‘Remember when we got stuck in that motel room in Coffs Harbour during the floods?’ I said.
‘Mm,’ he said.
‘And then bananas got really expensive.’
‘All the sugarcane was fucked.’
‘That was coming down, with Mum,’ I said. ‘Remember on the drive up with Nan when we stayed at the Peter Allen motel in Tenterfield?
‘She had the tape of him. She played it in the car.’
‘Remember when she came to get us? She was wearing that jacket. Hot pink, made out of, like, parachute material.’
‘I just remember her shorts. Middle of winter.’
‘We stopped at the whispering dishes at that CSIRO place,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to speak about it anymore,’ he said.
I hated being split up, but that’s what happens to sibling groups. That’s what we were called. No one takes you in twos. Nan and Granddad would have, but by then Nan was wandering at dusk and forgetting to eat, and Granddad couldn’t look after three of us.
Sam was at the age where they try to transition you out of resi and into independent living. They put him up in a motel room. I got to visit him once. The caseworker left us alone, at least. Sam made us instant coffee with powdered milk. It made my heart go too fast. He’d stopped going to school by then. He said he felt like he was in jail. He asked me how I was going. I wanted to make him hurt, so I told him about how a boy tried to fuck me with a longneck. He got so angry I thought he was going to tear himself apart. He raved and shouted, searching the room for something to destroy. But he caught himself, stilled himself in time. I saw him working to contain himself, to flatten his rage.
That was not long before he got sick the first time. I’ve never seen him look as mighty since. He thinks I never forgave him for what happened but it’s not true. I know he couldn’t have helped it.
That last night in the hospital I came straight from work. Theo had already left. It was dark out.
‘The oncologist was supposed to come again at eight,’ Sam said, ‘but I don’t think he’s coming now.’
‘I don’t think he’s coming, either,’ I said. I went to stand by the window. Outside, below, the suburbs were pricked with light.
‘I’m scared,’ he said.
‘I’m going to stay with you all night,’ I said. ‘I just want to nick downstairs and get a Coke. Okay?’
When I got back he’d torn out the drip, the one they’d had so much trouble getting in because his veins had collapsed. It seemed like there was a lot of blood.
‘The fuck are you doing?’
‘Help me, Lal,’ he said. His eyes were dry. ‘I don’t want to stay here.’
‘You’ll get an infection.’
‘I’ll get one anyway.’
He listed in the bed, pressing a cotton patch to the crook of his arm where the shunt had been. I remembered, after the bone marrow transplant the first time, ten years ago, when he got pneumonia and almost drowned in his own lung-shit.
‘Where do you wanna go?’ I asked.
‘Country,’ he said. ‘Out where the dish is. Do you remember that? When Nan took us?’
‘Of course I do. But that’s hours away. That’s up near Forbes.’
‘If you don’t want to,’ he said, ‘I will take myself.’
‘What about Theo?’
‘I just want you to take me,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right.’
I dressed him in clean clothes. I brought the car around, parked it in a five-minute zone while I went upstairs to sneak him out. I felt frightened, and it must have shown. It was the first time I’d seen him smile in days.
‘We’re not robbing a bank,’ he said.
‘You’re supposed to tell them when you leave,’ I hissed. If he could have laughed, he would have.
We drove all night. At first I talked to him to keep him awake. I was scared he’d drop off and slip away for good. But sleep dragged him down. I arranged my coat around him to cushion his body, leaned his car seat back. I could smell us both; my sweat and his chemicals.
‘You gunna crash?’ he croaked, when we’d been on the road for some time.
‘What? No,’ I said, humourless, not understanding.
‘Then can you take off my seatbelt? It’s giving me the shits.’
The moon slipped away. I sang to myself to stay awake. I bought coffee and a chocolate bar at the servo. I had to help him sit on the toilet. He was too weak to stand up to piss.
Close to dawn I pulled into a truck stop.
‘We’re nearly there but I have to sleep, just for a bit,’ I said. ‘I’m knackered.’
I pushed my seat back, made myself a nest of jumpers and blankets.
‘Tell me the story of the lead masks,’ he said.
‘I’ll tell you when we get to the dish.’ The sky was silver, the long grass very still. The roos were crouched by the highway.
He was shaking then and I knew I should have taken him to the closest base hospital, but I’ve always been glad I didn’t.
TURNCOAT
The afternoons when Murray got home first, he liked to take the dog for a walk down the foreshore. In winter the fat palms shivered. Murray spent his days with trees. Naming them, measuring them, collecting the soil they stood up in. He’d lived in St Kilda for thirty-odd years, but sometimes the sour smells of rotting seaweed and dim sims and car fumes still surprised him. He had a habit of sniffing his fingers to see if they still smelled of forest at the end of the day. They never did, but sometimes his nails were still caked with soil.
The dog was a border collie named Quincy. Murray was engaged in a steady, patient strategy to win him over. He had a feeling the dog liked Lou better anyway but he kept trying. He had a feeling the dog was onto him.
Lou rang while they were out walking.
‘You down the beach?’ she said. ‘It sounds windy.’
‘Just on our way home. How was your day?’
‘Oh, a bit long. Got this really tu
rgid letter from the Honourable Minister for Education. It’s the death rattle. I reckon we’ll be gone this time next year.’
Quincy stopped and started sniffing at the pavement. Murray let him.
‘You’re sounding a bit nihilistic there, Louise.’ He was hurting in his joints like he might be coming down with the flu.
‘I’m calling it like it is. The union’s gone to shit. Nobody cares about these kids.’
‘Well, maybe not those wankers on Spring Street, but—oh, Quincy, mate—’ he grimaced. ‘Your dog is hanging a whacking great turd. On the pavement outside the Espy.’
‘My dog.’
Murray was happy he’d got a laugh out of her. He thought he was getting better, after all these years, at listening for the signs and signals. He’d been in love with Lou for a long time, but he was still scared of the sorrow of which she was capable.
At work, out in the forests, the first thing they did was choose a centre point, hammer in a star picket, run a tape out in cardinal directions. They could only hope that what they measured in that circle-plot patch was representative of the surrounding bush. Murray liked patterns he could read; liked trying to gauge things.
In their backyard, under the curve of the verandah roof, was an old church pew. Murray sat on it to pull off his boots. Inside at the kitchen sink he scraped half a tin of dog food into the metal bowl. It smelled foul; offensively meaty. He tipped in the leftover fried rice, then remembered dogs weren’t supposed to have onion. He plugged his fingers into the rice and tried to find any shreds of the offending vegetable. He went outside with the bowl in his hands. The sky was like something from a renaissance painting.
‘They’re called stratocumulus,’ he said to Quincy. He made the dog sit before he set the bowl on the bricks. He was aching all over.
He thought a bath might help. That’s what Lou would suggest. He went into the bathroom and turned on the taps.
He looked at his soft belly, the stencil of his ribcage. His dick hung down limply. Only yesterday he’d had a good wank in almost exactly this position, bracing himself with one hand on the veneer of the sink, thinking about Lou’s legs.
Murray stood looking at himself in the mirror. There was fine hair on the backs of his knuckles; bike-riding muscle clung to his legs. He shivered. The light in that room was like a doctor’s surgery. Those stupid energy-efficient bulbs Lou bought. They took forever to come on, and then made everything anaemic and dull. The wind came in through the gap in the sash window and made a noise like a toothy whistle. The tiles were cold underfoot. How could he relax in there? He reached over and shut off the tap. He tugged at the rubber plug and everything drained away noisily.
He stood under the shower instead. Through the bubble glass he could still make out the outline of his own reflection in the mirror, skin slowly turning pink with the steam. He turned to face the shower head, cupped the water in his hands; splashed it over his head like a baptism.
Lou was home by the time he’d dressed again. In the kitchen, talking quietly to the dog, scratching his belly. Quincy lay spreadeagled.
‘Bloody turncoat,’ Murray muttered. Lou turned up her face to him like a naughty kid; did her disarming smile, still crouched. She went on stroking the dog. Sometimes Murray wanted to write poems or songs for her, but he didn’t know how. She was like a cigarette itch.
They were becoming older in symmetrical ways, both of them rangier and bolshier. He had the elegant sort of skull that was kind to thinning hair. She tried to sit up straight these days, to undo years of a tall woman’s self-conscious hunch. Somehow they had always managed to coordinate their spasms of melancholia so that one of them kept it together. Hers were shorter, more acute, more frequent. Often precipitated by a tiny failure: a forgettable embarrassment.
It was happening again, Murray was sure. Last week they’d gone to a friend’s book launch. She’d clutched her glass of wine with that private, terrible look on her face. Every time someone tried to make conversation, she’d slipped away and left him to do the work. He hated explaining her awkwardness. She knew it. She was always apologetic, always guilty after the fact.
‘We can just go, Louie,’ Murray had said. ‘Tim won’t care. We’ve said hullo. We’ve bought his book.’
‘Can’t. He’s our friend,’ she’d said, as though that explained it. They’d fought between the tram stop and their flat.
Now she straightened up, kissed him on the cheek. He couldn’t even remember what that other Louise was like.
In the forest, in that theoretical circle plot they’d measured out, they had to work out the diameter of each tree. The universal standard was diameter at breast height. Lou had laughed the first time he’d described it to her; the way you had to throw a measuring tape around the trunk and catch it with the other hand, pull it tight to get a reading. ‘Wouldn’t want Hinch to hear about that,’ she’d said. ‘You’re literally tree-huggers.’ Murray was a shy romantic. He could throw his arms around a tree and work out how much carbon was in a forest, but holding Louie, pressing his face to her neck, did not permit him to estimate anything.
Murray’s sister came for tea. Lou had taken to inviting her more regularly, after the divorce had come through and her children had moved out. Lou insisted it wasn’t pity: ‘I just can’t imagine going from a four-person household to living by yourself,’ she’d snapped once, when Murray had asked, but he hadn’t really seen the difference between that and charity. Lou had always gotten along well with his sister. She always remembered the kids’ birthdays, what they were studying, where the boy was playing his gigs.
Lou made soup, and when she was slicing the bread she turned to say something and the breadknife nicked her fingertip. There seemed to be a lot of blood. It dripped over the bread and the cutting board, and ran into the lines of her palm when she held up her hand in shock.
‘Let me get a look,’ Murray said. She’d cut a jagged flap of skin from the tip of her middle finger.
‘Have you got elastoplasts in your bathroom?’ asked his sister.
‘Yes, but we’ve got no bread,’ Lou said in a panic, and they all laughed.
Whenever his sister started on about menopause, Murray kept his mouth shut and listened for Lou’s empathetic murmur. He was grimly fascinated by the way they spoke. When he was a child his mother, then his sister, too, had burned their sanitary napkins in the incinerator in the backyard. He remembered watching them from the doorway, poking the soiled stuff with a stick. He didn’t really understand the way any of it worked, but something about that memory of his mother and sister standing there by the incinerator at dusk made him think of bleeding as a ritual, something secret and pyrrhic. He’d tried to explain it to Lou once. Nothing too mystical about it, she’d said. It’s a sort of dragging pain at the tops of your legs.
Murray and Lou stood in the kitchen after his sister had left.
‘The way she talks about it—it’s almost like a grieving process, isn’t it,’ Lou said thoughtfully, drawing the tea towel in between her fingers. ‘I’ve never even thought about it like that. Isn’t it funny. None of us understands one another at all.’
She flung the cloth over one shoulder like a waitress; turned back to the sink. Murray watched the shadows on the back of her neck as she scrubbed.
‘You’re beautiful, Louie,’ he said.
She looked up in surprise. She was already grinning. ‘When I’m doing the dishes.’
Out in the forest, once they’d measured the trees, they moved on to the other parts of the ecosystem. There was a way of breaking down the bush into the trees, the shrubs, the herbs and grasses, the litter—the leaves and sticks—the fallen boughs. Last was the foot of soil underneath it all. They measured everything; left holding armfuls of brown paper bags filled with leaf litter, cores of soil.
Murray wanted to say, Don’t be sad, Louie, but it didn’t seem to fit. She looked indefatigable, pushing her hair back from her forehead with the back of her hand; she looked placid. Ha
d he dreamt it? He felt unwell.
‘I might jump in the shower before bed,’ he stammered.
‘Okay,’ she said. She glanced at him over her shoulder again. ‘You all right? You look a bit grey.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
He set the tap running. He stripped off his clothes quickly, and tried not to look at himself in the mirror, but that made it worse. He shut off the tap and sat on the edge of the bath. The cold enamel dug into his bum. He put his head in his hands.
‘You all right?’ Lou’s voice floated in under the door. ‘Murray? Don’t bloody pass out in there.’
‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘Can’t a man take a shower by himself?’
The water was pooled at his ankles. He sniffed his hands. They smelled like nothing at all.
Midweek he had to drive out to bushfire country. In the morning he and Lou fucked sleepily. She reached for him like a lucid dream; froggy hands, stale breath. He was barely awake when he came. Afterwards she sat on the toilet and complained about the tiles being cold under her feet, and gave him a torpid leadlight smile, exactly like that Ray Carver poem. He almost told her that. The first time he’d come as a kid, he’d thought there was something wrong. It had frightened him that he was capable of it. He’d called for his mother, panicked, hand still clutching his cock. His mother wasn’t home. He’d thanked God regularly for years afterwards. Remembering it even now made him ache with embarrassment. He’d told Lou that before. She’d laughed like a child.
After all these years Murray was still struck by that immediate disorientation that came with a new site, walking in circles, lining out tapes. It all looked the same. There was no north, no south. All the trees were mountain ash at first. He liked mapping out the people, too. The ecological researchers were young and efficient; they did things by the books. They spoke less, worked cheerfully. The old boys were quiet to begin with, but they got to talking as the day wore on. Then the fieldwork moved slower. They’d stop to lean against the trunks, watch the researchers measuring leaf litter or diameters, and theorise on relationships. By the end of the day, Murray was always so familiar with the site that he’d wonder how he was ever disoriented. He liked working with the CSIRO blokes, who insisted on taking a six-pack of Melbourne Bitter—though they were all from Canberra—in the ute fridge. At the end of each day they had a sort of debrief before they went back to the motel. Murray liked the ceremony of that.
Pulse Points Page 5