All these things she wants at once, and can’t seem to get a grip on.
She feels she might set a fire. Through her palmskin, through the bird, through her gut gush blood. Fire in her mouth, sharp teeth, tongue.
She’s not hungry,
(but)
the darkthoughts are strong.
And she knows that she has to consume this creature, as she had to consume her boy, her William, when they set him (no, his body) in her arms, and she held him (not him) with teeth and tongue and breasts and heart and skin and so much want it nearly killed her, a want that could only be filled by him, by his tiny body, but also what he was and might have been to her, been to them, become. And she saw then that the bird—William—was empty, as empty as she was, and what is the sum of two empties? Can you fill one with the other?
Of course, she didn’t eat William like an animal, though a part of her needed to take him back, make him hers again in the way he was meant to be. She’d leaned her head down against him. She holds the bird to her face, and it does not move. The child was not warm. She is cold. The sheets and the carpet have abraded her legs, chafed her, and she craves water, a bath where she might be able to do it all again, make it right, push him out into a warm wet world not so abrupt or shocking and he might persist in it. Another world. Where she might keep him alive, and together in the water, still connected, she’d hold him for the first time (not like this) and feed him two ways at once and he would cry the mewling wail of newborn and she would cry because she had seen the alternative in a dream, just a dream that was never just a dream but this awful bubbling barrenness that no one could breach or salve or share.
She holds the bird to her lips, but,
then,
doesn’t bite it.
She could, if she wanted, slip its fine skull into her mouth and detach it, so easily, she could. But what difference would that make? Its head flops against her chin, broke-necked and miserable. She’s tired of dying.
She’s tired of waiting.
Something new surges up in her, fierce and red, and she readies to throw it into the world.
chapter 3
The rain goes on, puddles on the low roads and at the bottom of the street, and the city braces for a flood that may or may not come. Inside the house, time re-forms itself around him, everything sliding away—baby, funeral, marriage, wife—even as he remains motionless. She does not leave their bed. He cannot get the clothes to dry.
Too much time alone, inside his head, inside Berlin Warne’s head, and he is on the lip of something. He needs to hold Elise and be held back, he needs to wrap his pain inside hers, make her cry, make her scream, make her something other than empty.
Once, out of boredom or desperation, he calls Hannah Wallace. He hangs up before she answers.
He doesn’t want to be working. He wants to grieve. But here he is, at his desk again, writing, scanning the internet for pictures of Hannah Wallace. Recent pictures, of course. He has so many of her younger face on his wall that those crisp cheekbones, brown eyes are familiar even now, fifteen years later. He clicks and scrolls. She’s been living in New York, Santiago, Warsaw. Sydney. Making short, strange films. Her hair is buzzed short. Her lips crook up to the left.
She was the painting that made him.
The first, real Berlin Warne.
And she was fifteen when he did it.
The painting, the elopement, the lawsuit by her parents.
A printed-out image of the painting is there on Dan’s wall among the rest. In the centre, a vulva, her vulva, reconstructed by the artist with animal skin and paint and steel and hair and wood. It wrenches his gut, like all the best art. The real piece, he’s heard, has texture and depth, is even more beautiful. Grotesque. Above the vulva, two hands, her hands, tear at a plaster of skin over it, pulling it wide, ripping it open. Tattered edges like old cloth, fluttering.
It is body not-body.
Maybe, Dan thinks, it’s Hannah that’s missing. Maybe she is the thread.
As soon as he thinks it, his whole body warms. He pulls the picture of the painting off the wall, leans it against the screen of his laptop, where it sits against a page of Google images of her face. Old over new. Physical over digital. It means something, he knows it.
In the picture, the hands and vulva are hers. But the moment belongs to the man who re-created it. And now to the man who watches.
How could it have taken him so long to figure out? In one phone call, she gently exposed his attempts at progress, at knowing the man beyond or despite the stories he grew up with. He would like to tell her those stories, shade them against her light. Because they were not kind. Dan’s mother had had plenty of empathy for others, but very little for her own brother, who had, she’d said, ‘always been a narcissist’ and ‘never considered the implications of anything he did’ even before the controversy that had been Hannah Wallace.
It strikes Dan that maybe this was why his uncle asked him to write the book. They are alike in this way, in how they take other people’s lives and make them their own, and call it art.
Dan glances at the bookshelf beside his desk, where his own art sits. He should have left them in the box when they moved here, these dusty books of his: companions, yin and yang, two halves to a sharp blade. The Alternative—nonfiction—from ‘the real-life son of Own Your Cure health guru Sibyl Warne’ that ‘exposes the questionable ethics of the alternative health movement’. Published in ten languages.
His mother had survived that one.
But the next, a novel, was different.
Stark white, its black title, The End, seemingly handwritten. ‘A heart-stopping story of love and loss, from the author of New York Times bestseller, The Alternative,’ the cover gloated. Some blurbs from famous people. Not his mother’s friends, but other famous people. Authors who didn’t care that he took his mother’s life, the life he grew up in, and punished her for it. With it.
Maybe now, older and wiser and all that, he’d do things differently. He wouldn’t write the novel and she wouldn’t end up in the cold swell of the Pacific Ocean north of Monterey.
Dead.
He needs to learn to say it how it really is.
Maybe, he thinks, the ghostwriting, the whole memoir, is some kind of twisted revenge, his uncle’s fucked-up attempt to expose Dan’s cruelties, a new kind of trans-media artwork. Maybe, this time, Dan is the art.
*
He is about to call Hannah Wallace when the weather breaks. Sun trickles through the front window of the spare room, his office, and pools in the lambskin on the blue slipper chair, spiders up the floor with the shadows of panes and legs and slats. Dan walks to the window and surveys the quiet street that glistens with wet, the high steely clouds. Straight across is the neat white house with black trim. A small car pulls into the drive, and the dark-haired woman gets out, circles around to unbuckle the baby from the back seat. It’s grown chubby; he can see its pink cheeks from here.
The woman turns with the baby on her hip, sees him at the window, and pauses. The moment hangs. But then she raises a hand to him, smiles and waves.
It’s a kind smile. Dan lifts his hand back.
He stands there until she’s gone. He wonders how he would feel, how Elise would feel, if the neighbours’ baby had died instead of William. How sinister the house across the street would seem, how nightmarish. Contaminated. A drain into which all bad things flow.
He would like to feel Elise’s arms around him, the press of her chin into his back. But she is there in the main bedroom, closed in around herself, and he is here in the spare, pent-up and destructive, and maybe he will never feel those things again.
Dan changes his clothes and slips on his runners and for the first time in days, in almost a week, he leaves the house. Walks along the leaf- and bark- and stick-clotted street to the park at the end. There in the gutter is a Barbie head, blonde and startled. It reminds him, eerily, of Elise.
The park is overgrown, has not been m
owed since the weather set in, and the grass scratches his ankles as he thumps across it to the hill on the other side. He should go slowly, jog the first attempt, but when he starts up he finds he can’t go slowly at all. His body seems to push itself hard, harder, until his lungs shoot fire, his groin aches, black spots dance around the edges of his eyesight.
He walks back down.
People emerge from their homes, slowly, as if dazed by the light in the sky. It’s like in the movies, he thinks, after the asteroid, the war, the tidal wave, the apocalypse. The moment the survivors reclaim their lives.
A young man stands in his front doorway with a coffee to his lips. A woman sets a toddler on a bright plastic tree swing. Everything fervent, anxious. Behind him, the swing rope groans. Dark clouds to the west, huddled over Mount Coot-tha.
The survivors, he thinks. Has he survived?
As if to prove it, Dan begins again, up the hill, running as though they’re all watching him, judging him, running as if he’ll win whatever race this is, just to show them he can.
He counts in his mind, pounds out a ridiculous pace, trying not to look too far ahead, to the top, and he’s nearly there when it happens—a searing, stabbing pain not in his hamstring or his knee but in his chest. A knife dipped in acid, and he buckles,
can hardly breathe into the waves of tightness, gapes towards the air
but can’t reach it.
Dan drops onto the kerb and leans over his thighs and gasps. He imagines a straight tube from his mouth to his lungs, no bend in the line, and wills air into it.
Again, a fish. Slopped out of a net onto a slick hard deck, eyes wet and mouth open, left to suffocate in so much oxygen.
No one asks if he’s okay.
He shouldn’t expect them to, these strangers, and yet when the rain comes and pushes them back inside their houses, he’s relieved.
In the hot shower spray he rubs the lavender soap over his chest and it does not lather, is not that kind of soap. Even now, after everything with his mother, he buys the natural stuff. The Dr Bronner’s that stings when it gets in his eyes and clouds the shower screen with opaque splatter. His groin throbs from the run, and he tries to stretch it, massages the band of tendon where his leg meets hip.
He hasn’t touched, been touched in so long now.
Pulse beats beats beats. The water is warm, his hand is warm.
He lets a body not-body enter his mind, settle onto him, lavender-scented, and he pushes against her, warmwet and pressing, up and down. She wraps her strong legs around him, clampsuck vagina, and then she is off and tasting herself on him, running the tip of her tongue up the vein at the front, threatens to burst him open, red and powerful. When he comes, it is in great heaving spurts, and he leans forward into the shower tiles and lets it rack his body with relief and sadness.
Hot, sharp tears.
‘Dan?’
From the open door, she startles him. He straightens, quickly rinses his face and belly before he slides the glass door open. His hands in front of his genitals. What did she see?
‘I went for a run,’ he says.
But then he sees her, and she is like a thing out of a horror movie. For a moment he cannot be sure that she’s real, or alive. Her hair is stringy, her limbs so thin. She is holding something in her hands, a small feathered thing, and he wonders whether she has killed it, has brought it to him like a cat.
‘I didn’t kill it,’ she says.
They stand apart, ten steps between them. The corner of the sink.
In the movie version of this moment, he would walk to her and lift her face to his face, her hazel eyes moist and lips parted, trembling, and he would kiss her, and the bird would press into both their chests, between them.
But this is not that.
‘Do you need something?’ He doesn’t mean it to sound like it does. He clears his throat. ‘What is it?’
‘A sparrow,’ she says. She looks down at the bird in her hand, rubs it with her thumb. Its legs spindle out over her wrist. She looks up at him, straight into his eyes.
‘Well,’ he says. He doesn’t understand. ‘Do you want me to throw it out?’
She shakes her head, smiles thinly. ‘I’m going to keep it. For good luck. Better luck.’ And she turns then, and leaves the room.
Dan flicks off the shower, grabs a towel, and rushes after her into the hall. ‘Hey,’ he says. His throat is dry. ‘Do you want some dinner?’
In the doorway to their bedroom, she stops, swivels to face him, leans her temple to the frame. Her eyes are soft and filmy. ‘Do we have steak?’ she asks, after a moment.
‘I can get some.’
In her nightdress and her mourning, she is the spectral colour of the jamb. Her edges seem to fade into it. ‘Yes,’ she says, and disappears.
*
He brings home a rib fillet as big as his outstretched hand, and she comes to inspect it. She’s showered and changed, and though her body carries the breast and belly of pregnancy, her collarbones protrude and her cotton shirt hangs loose.
‘It looks like Australia,’ she says, and he laughs, because it does. Fatty edges like wide creamy beaches; a thick streak through the centre of Queensland and New South Wales, a great fat inland lake. She runs her finger along it, pokes the fat and the meat gently.
Dan opens a bottle of shiraz and pours two small glasses, hands her one, clinks his edge to hers. ‘Cheers,’ he says, and lets his mouth fill.
‘I don’t want it, actually,’ says Elise, licking her fingertip.
‘The wine?’
‘The steak. I want to save it.’
Dan sets down his glass. ‘I got it for you, for tonight.’
‘Maybe I’m not ready. I don’t know.’
He rewraps the steak in its paper and slides it to the side. Leans on the kitchen island on his elbows.
‘I’m worried,’ he says.
‘How are—’ she starts, but does not finish.
‘How am I feeling?’
‘No,’ she says. She does not look at him.
‘Because for a moment there, I thought you were asking how I was going.’
She looks up, but her eyes are far away.
‘It fucking sucks,’ he says. ‘Since you asked. I have never hurt so bad as I hurt right now. Nothing—’ His voice cracks.
‘You know,’ she says, ignoring him, ‘I feel sometimes like this isn’t my life. Like maybe sometimes when I’m asleep, I’m in another place, another reality, and everything is the same but different. Better. The way it’s supposed to be. And then I wake up to this.’ She sighs. ‘Maybe I’ll forget. I won’t even remember there was something else. A word I can almost think of.’
‘William,’ he says.
Her eyes turn sharp. ‘That’s not what I meant. I will never forget his name.’
‘Can we talk now?’
She doesn’t answer.
‘Seriously, Elise.’
‘You know what?’ she replies. ‘I am serious. I am seriously tired of having to talk about everything all the time. My work, my decisions, my baby.’
She pants with the words, cheeks flushed. A change in the air. As though, if he dared put his hand on her, he’d feel a current in her skin.
The refrigerator clicks on, a low humbuzz.
‘Your decisions,’ he says. ‘Your baby.’ He wants to cry.
But he doesn’t want to cry alone.
‘I don’t get it,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t just you who lost here. He was our son. Ours. Yours and mine. No,’ he says, when she moves, and his hand snatches her wrist on the cold, stone bench. He knows what this will do. What her father was like, and he does it anyway.
‘You don’t get to run away again. You need to listen. Get a grip, stop being so selfish. This isn’t just about you and what you want. What about us? What about me?’
‘Please let me go.’ Spaces snarl between the words.
‘We need to talk about this.’
But she shakes off his hand, and
his wineglass tips and breaks and shiraz flows across the white benchtop, and by the time he turns back with a towel from the sink, she is gone.
chapter 4
That night, Elise lies in their bed, alone, waiting not-waiting for Dan to come in; thinking not-thinking about what she might say. Her mind flits. She hears him go into the other bedroom, maybe to write, or sleep, or jack off, and that’s fine. Her skin is cool like a snake’s against the night air that leaks into the bedroom from the open patio door. She lets it sweep across her. There is no more rain.
But she’s hungry, so after a while like this, cooling, she gets up and barefoots down the short hall to the kitchen. The wooden floors feel good on her soles, solid and real. Two, three steps in the wrong direction and she’s at the closed door—the spare room, William’s room, Dan’s office—and she pauses, because even when she doesn’t look directly at it, it blooms out at her, and she is compelled to touch it though it hurts to do so, as if it were hot, a lamp or brand.
In the kitchen, she opens the fridge, and in the vegetable crisper is the little bird in a plastic bag, where she left it. She removes it from its filmy shell and presses it to her lips. It hardly smells like anything. She’s hungry, but not for birds or cheese or fruit or a bowl of cereal, wants something silky, something to melt over her tongue, flesh in her mouth, and so she places the bird back in the bag in the drawer and pulls out the steak instead. Unwraps the butcher paper and examines it.
Fibres strain upwards, towards her, red, pink, pigments to bind oxygen, iron.
The Santoku is in the second drawer, rarely used, still as sharp as when it was gifted, and heavy in her hand. She runs the blade along the top surface of the muscle, and a jagged slip of beef, paper-thin, cleaves from its body, clings to the grooves in the knife. Carefully, she peels it off the blade, sets it on her wet tongue.
Again.
Again.
The meat is velvet.
Female.
Unlike anything she has tasted.
Elise faces the gap where kitchen meets hall, wants to and does not want to be caught—nothing has been so good for so long, and she aches to wake Dan and share it, but she shouldn’t. This is hers. Is becoming her. And he is, no longer,
The Breeding Season Page 3